Transfer policy under discussion
By Steve Herring
Published in News on May 20, 2016 1:46 PM
Nearly 1,500 of the county's approximately 19,000 public schools students are attending schools outside of their home district this year.
Five schools account for 768 of the 1,495 out-of-district students: Greenwood Middle School, 207; Eastern Wayne High School, 177; Meadow Lane Elementary School, 168; Tommy's Road Elementary School, 122; and Rosewood Elementary School, 94.
Getting as many of those students back into their home districts as possible and then exercising better control of the system's transfer policy needs to be done before addressing district lines, Wayne County School Board members said during a special called session Tuesday afternoon.
Discussing the transfer policy and district lines has become a common refrain for the school board.
Board member Arnold Flowers has been an advocate for looking at district lines since he was first elected to the board.
Changing one district line affects others as well, he said during the Tuesday session.
"I have never been an advocate for doing anything big, but the longer you wait, and the longer the disparity (in enrollment size) is, the bigger it is," Flowers said. "All I have ever been an advocate of is us looking at it on a routine basis where we can make little moves at the time."
Superintendent Dr. Michael Dunsmore said that he thinks that is the goal -- to get to a point where the board can look at development and enrollment numbers and make "little shifts" in the lines to ensure one school is not being overcrowded while the school next door has space.
"I certainly hope we will take into consideration how many students in Wayne County are out of district to begin with before we start tweaking one district line," Chairman Chris West said. "It is like I said, it is going to be physically impossible, I guess, to put every one back in the district that they live in.
"But we could do that on paper to identify the actual numbers before we start doing anything with district lines, because if we have overcrowding at Norwayne, and we have got 150 kids out of district, and all of a sudden those kids are back in the district where they live, then we don't have a problem of overcrowding. Or any other school."
Another thing to consider, Dunsmore said, is as the county adds space in elementary schools the county can hold to district lines on that level.
"Then as they move up through (the grades) that again will give us the time to get the middle school situation solidified before they arise into middle school areas and then up to the high school level," Dunsmore said. "That way it is not taking the students that have been in one school and just uprooting them and moving them. There will be a chance to do that through attrition and growth."
Board member Eddie Radford said he and Flowers disagree on drawing lines.
"I go back to Chairman West that the liberal policy that we have on transfers is out of whack," he said. "Not only does that have something to do with the number of kids in schools, but also athletics and other things that go with the school.
"After a while the kids know where the good teams are going to be. They know where the good players are going to be, and they, if they want to, can just about maneuver themselves into that situation. So we need to get kids into their home schools before we do anything with drawing any lines."
Dunsmore said that he and assistant superintendent Dr. David Lewis have already talked about holding to district lines as enrollment starts for the new school year.
"As we get down the road, two, three, four five years if we are not holding to the lines on that transfer policy, we are never going to be able to shift and adjust and do what we need."