With good reason, Carmen Summers never really felt certain about her son’s future in Kirkwood schools as a transfer student.
Since changing schools last year, she has prepped him for what she had hoped would never happen — a forced return to the Riverview Gardens district.
“I explained to him about the laws, and that anything could change,” Summers said. “‘You may have to go back.’ He misses his friends, but as far as everything else, he wants to stay in Kirkwood.”
Even after lawmakers passed a measure last week intended to clarify Missouri’s transfer law, Summers and hundreds of other transfer student parents remain in limbo.
Several variables could determine how many children might be able to continue as transfer students and whether buses will still transport them to their new schools for free.
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For starters, no one knows whether Gov. Jay Nixon will sign the bill that was intended to scale back the cost and scope of a law that has sent more than 2,000 students from the Riverview Gardens and Normandy districts to better schools in the region.
The bill would seem to preserve the right of children who have already transferred to remain in their new schools, with a few caveats.
On the other hand, the legislation would potentially cut off any free transportation for such students.
Unaccredited districts would no longer be required to cover bus costs — possibly leaving close to 1,000 transfer students at Francis Howell, Mehlville and Kirkwood schools with no way of getting there.
“For many of the transfer families, that’s the only way they can access any other school district,” Kirkwood Superintendent Tom Williams said.
And the situation is even muddier for the roughly 1,000 children who have transferred out of the Normandy School District.
That district — which is on the brink of bankruptcy — would be dissolved entirely under a recommendation to the Missouri Board of Education released last week.
The proposal would effectively end the unaccredited Normandy district and replace it with a new school system.
Under the plan, new transfers out of the district would not be allowed. But those who have already left Normandy would be allowed to continue in their new schools — but with a lot of “ifs,” such as arriving at a tuition rate.
The state school board is likely to take up some form of the proposal today.
Education leaders in the region had hoped the legislative session that concluded Friday would bring clarity to student transfers. Instead, many complain that the situation is worse.
“It’s just a mess,” said Don Senti, executive director of EducationPlus, an umbrella organization representing numerous St. Louis area school districts that oversaw the transfer process last summer.
Confusion has surrounded the issue since June, when the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a law that allows students in unaccredited school districts to transfer to better schools with their home district paying tuition and transportation.
The court ruling led the state education department to issue guidelines defining how the transfers would play out. Transfer students could be turned away from districts that lacked space. Meanwhile, free buses would only be offered to select school districts.
The bill approved last week reaffirms the right to deny transfers based on class space.
The bill also encourages receiving districts to reduce tuition costs. If they do, the test scores of the transfer students would not be included in the state’s annual accreditation review of schools.
But the bill also could effectively end transfers for hundreds of students — most significantly by removing any obligation that students be offered free transportation. That would mean, for example, that parents who opted to send their children from Normandy to Francis Howell would be responsible for the 20-plus-mile commute.
Missouri Rep. Vicki Englund, D-south St. Louis County, said she is optimistic that even if the bill became law, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education might continue enforcing its guidelines that call for free limited busing.
“But we don’t know for sure that that will happen,” she said.
Another measure in the bill, meanwhile, could render hundreds more students ineligible for transfers. It requires students to attend their home district at least a semester before transferring — disqualifying transfers directly from private schools or home schools. Estimates suggest 550 existing transfer students fit that category.
Should Nixon sign the bill, it would fall to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to sort through the new law and tell area school districts how to proceed.
Normandy School Board members are urging the governor to veto the bill.
“We were hoping for a concrete solution that would not only address the tuition fees we are forced to pay monthly as a result of the current transfer law, but also would provide viable supports for the Normandy School District and its students,” said William Humphrey, Normandy School Board president.
The most debated aspect of the bill would give voters in unaccredited districts the option to use local dollars to pay tuition for children wishing to transfer into nonreligious private schools within district boundaries.
Nixon has already said he opposes that provision, though his office has yet to say whether he would veto the bill as a result.
The inclusion of the private school provision won support from many school choice advocates, even though there are no nonreligious schools in Normandy, and just one in Riverview Gardens.
“On the whole, we’re really happy,” said Kate Casas, state policy director of the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri. “We’re pleased with the bill.”
But she also said the transportation portion of the bill was concerning.
“It’s not perfect, and nobody’s 100 percent happy. It’s what we could get across the finish line.”
Englund said she would have preferred more certainty for parents such as Summers whose children have already transferred.
She said she at one point added an amendment to the bill that would have allowed the students who transferred this year to continue in their new districts until they graduated.
The amendment was later stripped from the bill. Those opposed wanted to know who would pay for it.
“We pass bills all the time that don’t necessarily have a steady stream to pay,” Englund said. “It’s not the kids’ fault that adults can’t figure out how to give them the best education possible.
