Board looks at transfer policy
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on October 18, 2017 5:50 AM
The Wayne County Board of Education discussed a new set of guidelines for student assignment and the drawing of attendance lines at its monthly work session Tuesday, setting the stage for a vote in November.
The new assignment and transfer policy -- policy 4150 -- is a nearly complete rewrite of the original policy 4130. It defines four goals -- student achievement, stability, proximity and operational efficiency -- which the district will use when drawing new school attendance lines.
The first goal, student achievement, refers to the basic goal of providing "an optimal opportunity for academic success for all students," according to the policy. To do that, the guidelines call for minimizing high concentrations of low-performing and/or low income students at any one school, an issue which the board has discussed several times but which had not been deemed an explicit goal of the district beforehand.
The second goal, stability, has to do with allowing students to stay at the same base school as their siblings without being involuntarily reassigned before leaving that school. However, the section mentions that when the district has to make reassignments, a child may still be moved even if it would separate them from their sibling.
Proximity, the third goal, refers to allowing students to go to school near their home. It also mentions attempting to minimize splitting neighborhoods as much as possible when drawing attendance lines.
The final goal is operation efficiency, or the optimization of facilities and resources. Addressing over- and under-crowding in schools has long been the board's fundamental goal for redistricting, as well as using new district lines to help clean up the school transportation system.
It is unlikely that every part of every goal will be achievable at the same time. For example, having students go to school near their homes would conflict with the idea of spreading out low-performing and low income students, as those students tend to come from the same areas.
Under the new policy, as in the old one, transfer requests for children of Wayne County Public Schools employees would have priority over all others. This would not apply to voluntary enrollment programs such as Wayne School of Engineering or Wayne Early/Middle College High School, said assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction Tamara Ishee.
"Say you have 10 children on the waiting list from the Brogden feeder pattern, and then I move down there," she said. "I'm just the 11th kid on that list now, I don't get priority."
The board will vote on the policy at its meeting Nov. 6.