Transfer letters go out this week

The Cape Girardeau School District will mail letters to parents of more than 600 students at Jefferson and Blanchard elementary schools, outlining procedures that would allow some of those students to transfer to three other elementary schools in the district.

The letters will be mailed no later than Friday, superintendent Dr. David Scala said.

Parents will have to fill out an application form if they wish to have their children transferred to Alma Schrader, Clippard or Franklin schools, he said. The application form will accompany the signed letter from Scala.

Low-income students at Blanchard and Jefferson who have low Missouri Assessment Program test scores will be given priority for school transfers, said assistant superintendent Pat Fanger. State education officials said that priority is spelled out in federal law.

The state won't release final Missouri Assessment Program test scores until November, Fanger said, and the preliminary figures don't include individual test scores, so the district can't determine yet which students received the lowest scores.

Transfers won't occur until the start of the second semester in January, Fanger said.

This is the first time the district has had to deal with the "school choice" provision of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

For the second consecutive year, Jefferson and Blanchard schools didn't make adequately yearly progress in state test scores. Jefferson School failed to meet this year's goals in both communication arts and math. Blanchard's black students failed to meet the goal in communication arts.

But the district only has room for a limited number of transfers to Clippard, Franklin and Alma Schrader elementary schools, officials said. Those schools scored high enough on the 2006 assessments to make AYP.

School officials are still calculating how many transfer students could be accommodated in each grade. That information will be disclosed in the letter, Fanger said.

The district, she said, will provide bus transportation for transfer students.

Under federal law, the district doesn't have to overcrowd achieving schools to make room for transfer students, said Mike Alexander, director of federal instructional improvement for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Alexander said other districts that have had to implement school choice have found few families will move their children to other schools.

He cited the experience of the Twin Rivers School District in Butler County in Southeast Missouri. The school district has two elementary schools a few miles apart, and one failed to make adequate yearly progress. The district offered the opportunity for students to transfer to the higher-scoring school, but none did, Alexander said.

"The long and short of it all is that most people aren't interested in hauling their kids across town," he said.

"What most people are saying is, 'We would rather you just work on fixing our school.'"

About 130 individual schools across the state have failed to make adequately yearly progress. Most student transfers have occurred in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas, where districts have multiple schools serving the same grades, Alexander said.

Even in the large, urban districts, the number of transfers has been low, he said. In the St. Louis School District, families of fewer than 200 students asked for transfers, Alexander said.

The "school choice" provision only applies to school buildings that receive federal Title I money to assist with educating low-income students. It also only applies in school districts that have more than one school serving students in those particular grades.

"School choice doesn't apply if you have only one elementary school," Alexander said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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