Prospect of unlimited transfers in K.C., St. Louis

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- For years John Murphy has spent about $12,000 annually to send his children to private Catholic schools in Kansas City, where dismal test scores have forced the state to yank the public district's status as an accredited school system.

So it's little wonder that Murphy and numerous other parents in Missouri's two largest districts are looking into taking advantage of a rarely used state law that would compel failing districts to pay to send children to the suburbs, a divisive new front in the debate over school choice.

Missouri's education law was changed in 1993 to require unaccredited schools to pick up the tab for tuition and transportation for youngsters living within their boundaries to attend accredited schools in the same county or a neighboring one. By most accounts, the rule has been used just once, and with troubling results.

Now, parents in Kansas City, which officially loses is accredited status in January, and St. Louis are breathing new life into the law. On the day in September when the state revoked Kansas City's accreditation, 15 parents showed up in the neighboring Independence School District seeking to enroll their children. The Raytown district heard from about 70 families, while the Center School District talked to about 30 families.

"From what they've told us, when it broke on the news they drove right over to enroll," said Independence superintendent Jim Hinson.

For Murphy, the Kansas City public schools are simply no option for his 10-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son, and his yearly tuition bills figure to soar once his children reach high-school age. Each year, he watches families who can't afford hefty tuition bills migrate to the suburbs when their children start kindergarten "like the wildebeest on the Serengeti."

"The past 30 years has been an absolute mess, and it's driven the middle class out of the city," he said. "It's killing the city."

Questions abound about how the transfer law works, and language in the two-paragraph rules offer little clarity.

In legislation written hurriedly in 1993, a long-standing law spelling out how students could transfer away from districts that didn't offer upper grades was transformed to force unaccredited districts to pay for sending students to nearby accredited schools.

But little attention was paid to its consequences, since lawmakers at the time were dealing with larger questions about overall state education funding and revamping how schools were accredited. The law, for instance, doesn't give the state the ability to intervene when failing districts don't pay tuition bills, and doesn't spell out how the failing district would transport transfer students. Plus, many lawmakers thought the revamped law still allowed accredited districts to turn away transfers, even though it deleted a section that said "no school shall be required to admit any pupil."

"In the grand scheme of things, I'm living down the sins of my past," said Otto Fagen, who drafted the law as a legislative staffer and is now the legislative director of Missouri National Education Association. "Back then I was just this guy working for the Senate. Now I've spent 10 years learning about and trying to advocate for real people who do real education every single day for not very much money."

State education officials say the rule has been used just once, an episode considered by many as a failure. After the 500-student Wellston district in the St. Louis area lost its accreditation in 2003, it quickly fell behind on paying tuition bills for its transfer students. It didn't finish reimbursing the suburban districts until June 2010 as it shut down.

With parents lining up to take advantage of the law in 2011, suburban district superintendents say that while all students deserve thriving schools, an influx will raise classroom sizes and could weigh down test scores.

"We want to know, how will this influx -- whether it's five, 50 or 500 -- affect us?" asked John Baccala, a spokesman for the Hickman Mills district bordering Kansas City. "Are they going to let us waive those test scores for two or three years until we can get them up to speed? I think all the school districts are saying the same thing."

In St. Louis, a coalition calling itself the Cooperating School Districts of St. Louis reported that its members had taken about 1,500 calls from potential transfer-seekers when it surveyed them informally last year, said David Kuschel, the organization's assistant executive director. The Clayton school district has about 120 families on its wait list, but it has received at least three times as many phone calls from parents inquiring about the process, said district spokesman Chris Tennill.

The St. Louis group has joined forces with an identical group in the Kansas City area to ask lawmakers for the ability to reject transfers if they'll overload classrooms and to give accredited districts three years before making them accountable for the transfer students' test scores.

The two groups also want to limit transfers to students who've attended unaccredited schools previously, saying that if students from private and parochial schools seek transfers, the state will suddenly be responsible for educating more students and place fresh strains on limited resources.

Lawmakers are already meeting to discuss potential changes to the law and could address them in the 2012 session. They first made an unsuccessful attempt at changing the law earlier this year after the Missouri Supreme Court sided with a group of St. Louis parents seeking free transfers to the suburban Clayton district. The court sent the case back to St. Louis County Circuit Court where a trial is scheduled for Jan. 23.

As that litigation moves forward, the suburban St. Louis schools have been refusing to accept unpaid transfers, though hundreds of city students have transferred to suburban schools through a voluntary transfer program that always has a waiting list.

It's unclear what will happen in Kansas City, a metro area still widely believed to be divided racially. During the city's decades-long desegregation effort, part of the solution included a program in which nearby districts could `volunteer' to take some Kansas City children. Just one did: Missouri City, which increased its total enrollment by 10 percent when it took in 10 students.

A new exodus to the suburbs could exacerbate old tensions and, combined with high class sizes, merely shift the district's burden outward, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C.

"The problem of the city becomes a problem of the suburbs," Jennings said.

Johanna Calhoun, a mother of three Kansas City district students and a fourth child attending a charter school, plans to stay put. The only way to fix the district is to pull together, she says, doubting that the suburbs want them anyway.

"They are going to have a big issue with inner city, African-American children coming to their schools because here in Kansas City they still believe African-Americans represent your property values dropping and schools being taken over by gangs," Calhoun said. "That's not true, but that's still how people look at it."