SAISD to Hear Enrollment Woes
By Michelle M. Martinez, San Antonio Express-News
Feb. 26–When Linda Hooper decided to take her son out of Foster Elementary School and put him in a charter school, nobody in the San Antonio Independent School District tried to persuade her to stay.
“I was really a little stymied when enrollment came for fifth grade and Nick didn’t show up,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, I guess they’re not wondering about us.”
I never got a call asking why isn’t Nicholas Hooper attending Foster.” Superintendent Robert Duron wants to do a better job appealing to parents like Hooper. Tonight, he and other SAISD officials are set to hear the findings of a $51,000 demographic study that is the first step in helping them try to reverse a decade-long trend of declining student enrollment in the city’s largest urban school district.
The study found that about 18 percent of students who attended SAISD schools in 2005 did not return last fall. However, new students enrolled in the district, helping to offset the decline.
The study describes as troubling the fact that the difference in students leaving the district and those coming in has grown from 864 between 2001 and 2002 to 1,340 between 2005 and 2006.
School officials say they know students are leaving for the Northside, North East and Judson public school districts, along with charter and private schools, but that they haven’t made a systematic effort to track students despite assistance available from the Texas Education Agency.
Marcos Zorola, assistant superintendent for technology and information systems, said tracking students, “would be a very cumbersome, difficult task,” but it is one Duron intends to take on with the establishment of a new office tentatively called Institutional and Community Based Research.
Plans for establishing the office, at an estimated cost of about $200,000, still need school board approval.
“My expectation really is return phone calls, being visible to the parents, being there in the moment with the parents when they have needs or when they have questions, asking them what they expect from the schools and working really, really hard to meet those expectations,” Duron said.
SAISD complies with a state requirement that school districts report the reasons that students in seventh through 12th grades withdraw according to one of nearly two dozen codes. For example, middle or high school students who leave one public school but intend to enroll in another are recorded as leaving to “enroll in a Texas public school” — one of the codes.
The district could access a state database to find out whether, in fact, students who say they’re leaving for another public school have enrolled in one. But Zorola said that method of tracking students is time-consuming because the computer database only allows administrators to search for one student at a time, and the district loses about 700 students a year between the eighth and ninth grades alone.
Another problem, Zorola said, is that there is sometimes a lag between when students withdraw from SAISD and enroll in another district, meaning district staff would have to search the system repeatedly to track them down.
The district could ask the TEA to produce a list of students who have left and the districts in which they’ve enrolled, but because that information is not available electronically, SAISD officials haven’t done so, Zorola said.
Duron has plans to improve the way the district handles things. He wants administrators to ask parents a few questions when they take their children out of school and to better track these students when they leave. He also wants to use telephone polls to better understand how and why parents are deciding to go elsewhere.
Zorola said some telephone polls would be conducted through an automated system that would allow parents to use their phone keypads to answer questions.
For example, he said, school officials could use the system in the summer to find out how many parents plan to enroll their children in SAISD schools in the fall.
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