Friday, July 12, 2002
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Friday, July 12, 2002 |
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School choice comes to Coweta Parents at five Coweta County elementary schools could opt to send their children to different schools this fall. For the 2002-2003 school year, Arnco Sargent, Atkinson, Elm Street, Eastside and Jefferson Parkway Elementary School will offer voluntary school choice under the guidelines of the Reauthorized Elementary and Secondary School Act of 2001. The proposed local policy passed Tuesday night by the Coweta County Board of Education authorizes Superintendent Peggy Connell to designate a school or schools that students can transfer to out of the school on the list, based on space availability and transportation patterns. Preference would be given to at-risk students, as the federal law requires. All students in schools who fail to make adequate progress after identification must be provided with the option to transfer to another public school within the system with transportation provided by the system. Students would be allowed to continue to attend the school to which they transferred until they have completed the highest grade in that school. Transportation would be provided at system expense for as long as the sending school is in needs improvement status. Once a school is removed from the list of "needs improvement" schools then the parents will be required to provide transportation or the student would transfer back to their assigned school. Students from Arnco Sargent will be allowed to transfer to Western, while students from Atkinson and Elm Street Elementary may transfer to Newnan Crossing Elementary. Students from Eastside may transfer to Willis Road and students from Jefferson Parkway may transfer to Northside Elementary School. Board Chairman Bill Covington noted that many Georgia school systems had not yet adopted a set of policies and procedures to implement the new federal rules, "which puts Coweta County Schools way ahead. I appreciate you getting out in front of this," he said. Dr. Judy Robinson, Coweta County Schools Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, said that her office will contact parents in the affected school districts by mail, and will ask that parents who are interested respond by the end of July. "We won't know the capacities at the choice schools until as late as Aug. 9," she said, adding, though, that parents will be notified before the start of school. The federal reauthorization act was a point of discussion earlier this year, when the state released an initial list of schools statewide which identified Elm Street and Jefferson Parkway Elementary Schools. The list expanded recently to five schools because of new standards released recently include schools placed on the "needs improvement" list that made adequate progress during the 2000-2001 school year, as well as those which had not. Schools are placed on the list if they do not demonstrate improvement as measured by a percentage of growth on the state Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT), which is administered every fall. Superintendent Peggy Connell administered a similar school choice plan in Talladega County Schools. "It's not a difficult situation," she said. "In fact, in my experience, parents appreciate the choice before them and yet remain committed to their schools." In Talladega, "99 percent of the parents who had a choice to move their child to another school remained, because they know the school, like it and know it is serving their children very well. I did see a renewed effort on those parents part to be more involved at the school, because the choice reinforced their personal stake in their school. Parents just clearly wanted to know what the school is facing and what is being done in response," Connell said. Based on preliminary data, Robinson expects two or more of the schools to show testing improvements sufficient to come off of the list next year. Dr. Connell agrees. "There is a concern on the schools' part that they are being labeled as underperforming schools," she said. "They are not. These standards use a narrow improvement standard in just one test a snapshot of student performance on one day and compare the performances of two separate student classes. What that indicates, at best, is that a small pool of students are not being served well, and we're committed to improving that," she said.
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