ATLANTA - School systems in Georgia are struggling to provide parents and students with the school choice options they seek.
In some districts like Cobb County, more students are applying to transfer to high-performing schools than the school can accommodate. In DeKalb County, parents say they are not told how school officials make decisions.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the demand for school transfers from Cobb families is outstripping the available supply. At the start of the 2012 school year, the district received 999 applications from students and accommodated 672 of them. This school year, the district received 2,794 applications to transfer schools. District officials said they can only accommodate 1,768 of those requests.
Cobb County school board member David Morgan said schools should have uniform criteria for deciding if they can take children trying to transfer. Cobb schools lack those rules, he said. School officials expect to get a report on the problem next month.
"I believe it's intentionally nebulous because then you can just kind of make rules as you go," Morgan said. "Because space is so nebulous, a lot of times the schools say we don't have space."
Georgia lawmakers adopted rules that took effect in 2009 and were supposed to make it easier for parents to switch schools. School systems are supposed to establish rules for granting inner-district transfers to any public school that has space.
Cobb parents can apply to move their children out of poor-performing schools. Unless they win a lottery system, the students requesting transfers are put on a waiting list. Parents said they are not told where they rank on the list or how decisions are made.
Karen Armstrong said she signed over temporary guardianship of her son to her sister so he could keep attending a good school in East Cobb.
"It tore me apart; it was horrible. He was like an hour away," Armstrong said.
Parents in DeKalb County were upset over the selection process used to select students for the county's magnet schools. A computer-run lottery system mistakenly classified some students as living outside the district and omitted them from the lottery. In other cases, the system dropped grades from student profiles.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2015/8/328370/ga-school-systems-struggle-with-offering-enough-school-choice