No reason to unpack. No time to make friends. No point participating in class. Hundreds of elementary school children in the Cape Girardeau School District bounce from school to school each year, changing homes, teachers and classmates almost as often as the rent is due.
The impact of such rampant mobility on a child's education is tremendous, but school officials have little control over the situation. Teachers such as Julie Harrington are accustomed to revolving door classrooms, but they can't get used to the repercussions frequent moves have on their students.
"I often find them to be withdrawn. They're afraid to make friends," said Harrington, who teaches at Franklin Elementary. "It's like, 'If I make friends with you, I'll just lose you again.'"
The issue of high student mobility rates is far from singular to Cape Girardeau. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent -- 20.3 million -- of children between the ages of 5 and 14 changed residences between 1995 and 2000. The majority of those moves were within the same county.
Mobility is strongly tied to economics, which makes places such as Cape Girardeau, with 41 percent of the total student population low-income, a hot spot for the problem.
"In this community, there's a significant number of people living paycheck to paycheck," said Cape Girardeau superintendent Mark Bowles. "They're responding to survival kinds of issues. To keep a child's education consistent simply can't be a top priority."
The average free and reduced lunch count -- which schools use to measure poverty -- among Cape Girardeau's elementary schools is 53 percent, while those same schools' mobility rate is 46 percent. Students in a family of four with an annual household income of $33,485 or less qualify for the free and reduced lunch program.
Meanwhile, neighboring Jackson's elementary schools' average free and reduced lunch count is 28 percent, and the mobility rate is 15 percent.
Districts calculate school mobility rates by adding the number of entries and withdrawals in a year, then dividing that total by the school's student population.
For example, at Franklin Elementary, 115 students enrolled or withdrew during the 2003-2004 school year. To find Franklin's mobility rate, 115 is divided by the school's total enrollment of 225 students for a rate of 51 percent.
However, a mobility rate of 51 percent does not necessarily mean that 51 percent of students at Franklin Elementary moved during the school year. Some of the withdrawal and enrollment transactions used to calculate the rate may be the same child moving in or out of a school multiple times.
As Rhonda Dunham has noted again and again during her tenure as principal at Franklin, some students may move in and out of a school several times in a single year, perhaps bouncing back and forth between two elementary schools in the district.
"We see it a lot but I can't pinpoint a certain ethnic group that it happens with most," Dunham said. "It's kind of sad. We realize a lot of it cannot be helped."
Dunham said children from single-parent families who rent, rather than own, their home tend to move more often. Factors such as divorce, affordable housing and the job market also come into play, Dunham said.
Moving in a month
In Harrington's second-grade classroom at Franklin, between 12 and 16 students moved in or out during the past school year. Some stayed for as little as one or two months.
Harrington said moving from school to school is especially a problem for special needs students because their records aren't always immediately sent. A child may go weeks without receiving necessary special services.
"I worry about the kids who grow up this way," Harrington said. "If they don't have a sense of home, will they become transient, too? Will we have another generation of these families?"
Because the issue begins at home, not in the classroom, school districts are left with a limited arsenal to fight the problem.
"We think after a hundred years of teaching we know what's best. But our population of kids is changing," Bowles said. "We have to transition away from excuses and do whatever it takes."
Bowles said his district has taken a few measures to improve the situation, including the alignment of curriculum and discipline policies among the schools.
That alignment, Bowles said, helps ensure that students are being taught the same things and disciplined in the same manner at all five elementary schools. However, that doesn't mean that all classes keep the same pace or that teachers have the same lesson plans.
A teacher at Blanchard may discuss addition in the fall, while a teacher at Franklin may go over that in the spring. A student who transfers in between may miss out on the topic completely.
The Developmental Reading Assessment is one of a few tools that helps local teachers track students' reading ability even as they bounce from school to school. The test is given to all students at the beginning and end of the school year, and the scores are sent with students when they transfer.
The district has considered moving from a typical elementary school configuration to attendance centers, which would house all students in a certain grade in the same building. Officials say that setup would provide consistency at school, although the true problem of instability at home would not be addressed.
"We don't have a lot of control over it. You can't say it's somebody's fault, there are so many factors that lead into this that there's no easy fix," said Harrington. "But we are trying."
cclark@semissourian.com
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