Public Schools, residency laws, and accessibility (why my kid couldn't attend public school)

[noamnety]

When my daughter entered kindergarten, I was a single parent living in Town A with a temporary job that paid $12 an hour in town B, which was a 50 mile commute. To get to work by 7am, I had to leave Town A before 6am.

The public school in Town A didn't open their latch key program early enough for me to use it. If the public school in Town B had let me enroll my daughter there, by the time we arrived in the mornings latchkey was open and she could have had access to public education. I ended up having to enroll her in the cheapest private school I could find near my work area. Paying for a private school when you earn $12 an hour sucks. When you are working a temp job with no commitment from the boss that you will still be there a week, let alone a year later, you can't commit to signing a lease and moving to the new area to allow your children to enroll in their schools.

Because public schools can (and usually do) limit enrollment to students that live in their district, they are restricting public education to those families who are physically in their district during the narrow window of time that latchkey opens and buses are running.

If I could change one thing about public education, it would be discriminatory enrollment policies that allow schools to refuse admission to students based on residency. Schools are paid for with public state and federal tax dollars, they should not be treated as if they are the private asset of the people who happen to live near them.

[NoNothing]

1. Correct me if I'm wrong

But I believe most school districts are funded mostly by property taxes, so in a way they are in property of the people who live near them.

[noamnety]

5. Michigan changed that 15 years ago

because it was resulting in the rich getting richer, the poorer districts getting poorer. But they retain the enrollment restrictions and use local millages to ensure the richer still have access to the richest facilities, and deny that access to those living in poverty.

If the property taxes are being used as justification for denying access to public education, perhaps that is inherently unAmerican and violates children's rights to free and equitable education.

Regardless of that, if all citizens are required to pay state and federal taxes into a pool of money that is shared among public facilities, all citizens should have access to those facilities, regardless of whether a local community votes to augment the local schools through millages.

[NoNothing]

10. That's a tough one

On the one hand, it is plainly inequitable that the poorest students receive the poorest education. On the other hand, it's hard for me to argue that a community shouldn't be allowed to provide more resources to its own students if they choose to do so, which they can't if other districts start sending all their kids to them.

[pnwmom]

24. Businesses also pay property taxes. I think they should change the laws to allow employees

to enroll their children in the district where they live OR where they work.

[TwilightGardener]

2. I like open-enrollment states, where you can send your kid anywhere

as long as they have room for him/her and you provide transportation. My kids are right now enrolled in a school where we do not reside, in fact, because we're living in a temporary housing situation. I feel for you, you have a tough situation. Maybe you can find a day-care lady or mom who could keep her for an hour or two in the morning and get her to school--might be cheaper than private school, anyway. That's what I used to do when my kids were younger.

[liberal_at_heart]

4. Boundaries change all the time out here

So to keep our children from being shuffled around from school to school we have either had to move from one street to the next or fill out a request for them to stay in the school they are in. With our daughter we did have to move once. With our son being autistic and change is not easy on him we requested he stay in the school he was in and the district approved it.

[ceile]

3. Sorry, can't agree with that.

Schools here are paid with property taxes of residents (obviously). Allowing for circumstances is one thing, but doing away with residency rules would be a big mistake.

[frazzled]

7. Many states have open enrollment policies--here's a database

http://mb2.ecs.org/reports/Report.aspx?id=268

[noamnety]

8. Do you consider the schools publicly or privately funded?

Do you consider them a public asset?

My view: The schools don't "belong" to the people who pay the property taxes on them. They belong to the general public for the common welfare of all. That's why even people without children are required to pay taxes to support the school system. And it's why - even if a part of local taxes go to maintaining roads, the general public is allowed to drive on them.

[Bluerthanblue]

11. very good points-

are they really "public" schools or not?

I think your perspective is a good one. We are investing in the future when we spend money on education.

As my late father would often say it's part of the dues we pay for living in a society.

:hi:

[dugaresa]

13. if schools were funded at the State level it would be different

the problem is that taxes vary by locale.

I live in District XYZ, that has a heftier tax rate than District ABC, our schools are far better. There are parents who enjoy the low tax rates of District ABC but then commit fraud to send their kids to District XYZ. Is that fair?

Now if all schools were funded by the State and districts were not gerrymandered by socio-economic circumstances then the tax and education field would be even but unfortunately that is not the case.

[noamnety]

17. I guess it depends on what you consider the larger injustice.

1. A family paying lower taxes to send their kid to a better public school
2 Children receiving unequal access to quality education because of where their parents can (or cannot) afford to live.

I'm trying to view that through a libertarian lens and a democratic lens. Which do you think falls where?

[dugaresa]

20. personally I think we should fund the schools through the state level

because that might result in better schools for all, but then again it might not.

[pnwmom]

27. Businesses pay half the real estate taxes in my city. These taxes support the schools.

Why shouldn't their employees be able to use these schools?

[noamnety]

28. That's an interesting angle

and one I hadn't considered at all.

[liberal_at_heart]

9. The way we pay for schools is one of the problems

The richer neighborhoods have plenty of money to subsidize their schools with local taxes. Our neighborhood just approved three property tax levies to support our local school district. Our neighborhood has the money to do that. Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars richer neighborhoods get from fundraising. I know in the past our elementary schools have raised as much as $30,000 in one year by doing local fundraising. And that doesn't include the non-profit organization that raises about $100,000 for gaps in the funding for our local school district. The poor schools have to rely on state taxes which gets continually cut. There is a reason poor kids don't get a good education and richer kids do get a good education.

[Pithlet]

26. Exactly. Open enrollment without fixing this problem could be a disaster in many areas

Particularly areas where the inequity is extreme. The better schools would be flooded with the "refugees" from the poorly funded schools, and the poor schools would be underfunded further as a result and many would end up closed, and the remaining schools on both sides overburdened and crowded. More in the better areas might be built to accommodate the influx, but again, seems like a round about way of doing what should be done to begin with. Just fund all the schools better and equally and everyone could stay put. And of course, implement exemptions for people in situations like the OP.

[pnwmom]

25. Businesses also pay property taxes. Why shouldn't employees have the choice? n/t

[frazzled]

6. This is a local issue, so ...

you should probably contact your state legislators to see if an open enrollment policy, as a number of states have, can be instituted through legislation.

Here, for example, is the Open Enrollment information for the state of Minnesota:

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_Choice/Public_School_Choice/Open_Enrollment/index.html

[noamnety]

18. I wish all states were set up that way.

Many of our local "open" enrollment policies are restricted to mean a student in a district can enroll in another school within that same district. That's no help when the parents are commuting any distance at all.

[dugaresa]

12. Was Town B too expensive to live in?

At $12/hr I would have moved to Town B and worked in Town B but granted if you owned a home then that is a different set of circumstances.

Some districts will work with you and come to agreements between Town A and Town B.

However I have also seen situations like those in Boulder Colorado where the folks who do support work like (teach, fire fight, nurse) can't afford to live there so they have to live far outside Boulder and commute in every day.

I myself used a latchkey program at the schools for years for my kids. They were there by 6:30 and I picked them up by 6pm.

[noamnety]

15. I couldn't move to Town B.

With me the issue wasn't the cost of living in Town B, which was actually slightly cheaper than Town A. This was a years back, and I was hired "Just til the war ended" (Desert Storm.) At the time, they were projecting it would be over in a month. Then it dragged out to two months, and so on. It wasn't until a full year later (midway through the kindergarten year) that the tank command decided they could offer me a different full time permanent job.

I couldn't sign a lease under those circumstances. Leases are usually a year long commitment plus first and last months rent plus security deposit. That's too much to gamble when your boss is saying you'll probably be out of there in a few more weeks and you don't have any other job prospects in the area.

I can see though that the point you raised probably happens a lot. There are probably a lot of people who provide services to an expensive area, but have to commute in because they can't afford to live there. Depending on their start times, I'm sure a lot of them do have the same problems I experienced with getting their kids into schools.

[Spike89]

14. A very touchy subject

Depending on the funding model, school quality and who pays for it can be really unfair. If nearby districts have an inequity, say one city is conservative and won't vote for any school funding increases is next to a community that supports its schools, is it really fair for the enrollments to "open"? True, sometimes the inequities are economic, poor areas vs. affluent, but it isn't always the case.

BTW - the last figures I heard for Federal "contribution" to K-12 public school budgets was just slightly less than 5%. States and communities provide about 95% of the money for public schools.

[noamnety]

16. I think it's mostly state funding, and yes, federal is minimal.

I remember reading that the most extreme disparities were in Texas. I don't know if they have revised there laws since then. The result of using property taxes to fund schools was that the money spent on public education on just one student in the richest district in a single year totaled more than was spent on one student in the poor district over the entire 12 years of school from 1st to 12th grade.

[FarCenter]

19. This also bears on the "school choice" controversy

in which there are advocates for letting parents remove students from "failing schools" and enroll them in "successful schools".

[noamnety]

21. It's somewhat related, although in my case it was in reverse.

The district I lived in (but didn't have access to) had better schools than the ones in the area where I worked.

Maybe a way to address that is that if you see a unidirectional exodus of students, the state should up the per pupil spending in that school. Once a higher level of equity is achieved, the students would stop leaving. It could be a self-adjusting system to ensure education is equitable.

[FarCenter]

22. There is a bigger problem you're part of -- the wretched state of child care for working parents

The availability, hours of operation, and expense for child care is a real problem.

This might be a good area to encourage some "jobs bill" spending. Since there are more unemployed males than females, and since the socialization of pre-teen and teen boys is pretty poor these days, it wouldn't hurt to also employ some men as after school child care workers.

[noamnety]

23. That's true.

In my case, I would have preferred to have her commute with me and go to school near my job so she could sleep on the drive in the mornings and have quality time/conversations with me on the way home instead of sticking her in two extra hours of day care on top of the latch key hours she was already putting in.

The child care tax credit helped with day care, but of course didn't help with the mandatory expense of the private school itself. And I'm not suggesting it should have covered the private school tuition - I'm only suggesting that the public schools should have been open to us (so we could have avoided the private school expense altogether).