Parents Weigh Children’s School Options: Some Consider Sending Kids to Facilities With Better Test Scores

By Isaac Groves, Times-News, Burlington, N.C.

Aug. 12–As parents get their children ready for the new school year, some of them have something extra to think about– whether or not to send them to a school with better test scores.

Patsy Simpson has a child at South Graham Elementary School, which did not make adequate yearly process again in the 2006-07 school year. She would like to take her child out of South Graham and take advantage of the school-choice option offered by the No Child Left Behind Act.

South Graham receives Title I federal funds. All schools receiving Title I funds with end-of-year test scores that don’t meet “adequate yearly progress” goals for two years in a row have to offer students the option to transfer to a school that is meeting its goals.

The Alamance-Burlington School System makes those selections, which Simpson understands. But her options as a parent at South Graham Elementary are limited to Sylvan Elementary School in Snow Camp or B. Everett Jordan Elementary School near Saxapahaw.

“Now I live on Rogers Road (in Graham), it’s a long way away,” Simpson said.

Simpson says she is well known to the school system and school board, and this is not the first time she has been critical. She has also participated on committees and generally been an active parent. She suspects the system doesn’t want parents moving their kids around.

The school system says that’s not the case, but the situation is complicated.

This is a strange time at the school system’s office building. The state still has to verify all the test results the government uses to rate schools and let parents know what their options are at the same time.

When the Times-News asked which schools have to offer choices, Jean Maness, director of elementary education and Title I, said the state does not allow the system to release that information until Aug. 17, after the state has verified test scores. That’s also when school starts.

“It’s not that we’re trying to be secretive, but until the state scores are released, it’s not public information,” Maness said.

Parents have to be told, of course, so they can decide whether or not to move their children. So the school system has released information about individual schools to students’ families and held meetings at schools over the past week.

Maness said there are seven schools offering choice in the coming school year, because the testing standards get tougher to meet every year. But that means the system had to find 14 alternatives with better test scores and balancing test scores and distance.

“We had to look at it from the system’s perspective,” Maness said. “We’ve had to use three schools twice.” There were some schools that could not be considered, Maness said. North Graham Elementary is a year-round school, so its schedule is not compatible with South Graham’s.

The newly opened Highland Elementary School is between Grove Park Elementary where Simpson’s goddaughters go to school, and one of its alternative schools, E.M. Holt Elementary. But, Maness said, because it has no test scores recorded yet, it cannot be added to the mix this year.

This is a tough year for scheduling school choice. In past years, there have only been as many as three schools that had to offer it, Maness said.

The system does have to provide transportation to students going to alternative schools, Maness said. It will provide it until the end of the grade level, like the end of elementary school, unless the original school meets its yearly progress standards for two years.

Most schools have afterschool programs as well to help out parents who have to pick their children up.

Some parents say they find the not-knowing to be as bad as the distance.

Simpson’s friend Rochelle Suffern said she wishes a lot of things for her son’s school.

She wishes he didn’t spend so much time preparing for end-of-grade tests, she wishes he was getting the kind of education her friends’ children are getting at magnet and private schools and she wishes she knew why he has to be bused all the way to Saxapahaw to get out of South Graham.

“It would be really nice to have some more information and find out how those decisions are made,” Suffern said.

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