10 leave magnet school
St. Andrews finds students live in different zone
By Diette Courrégé
St. Andrews finds students live in different zone
At least 10 students who have been attending St. Andrews School of Math and Science should have been going to a different school.
Those students returned last week to the West Ashley school they're zoned to attend as a result of a stringent address verification process the school is implementing. Most schools check students' addresses when they enroll, but not every subsequent year. St. Andrews is verifying the addresses of every student.
The Charleston County School Board passed a policy earlier this year requiring all schools to do more thorough address checks for every student every year, including having parents sign an affidavit about the information they provide. The district is phasing in the policy by checking only the five magnet schools with residency requirements this year and expanding to all schools next year.
St. Andrews began the verification process by checking the addresses of 106 students whose parents said they were zoned to attend the school. School officials got what they needed from all but the parents of 39 students as of Nov. 9. Many of those parents came to the school last week to turn in the remaining documentation, and about a half-dozen school and district staff were involved in calling parents and making home visits to wrap up the other cases, Principal Kevin Conklin said.
The time required to do the extra checks wasn't overly burdensome because the district loaned the school additional staff, he said.
Conklin didn't know the details as to why the 10 students left the school, and said that in many cases, their parents simply called St. Andrews to say they would be transferring. The 10 students were spread across different grades, he said.
Eight of the 106 families have appealed to the West Ashley constituent board to remain at St. Andrews. Those students will be allowed to remain at the school until the board decides their cases, which should happen Dec. 6. Families can appeal the constituent board's decision to the county school board.
Only two of the 106 cases still have incomplete files. Officials were doing home visits and trying to determine whether those children were legitimately enrolled in the school.
The school's remaining students, which includes students zoned to attend the school as well as students who live in the county and entered the school by lottery, received letters Nov. 9 requesting the updated residency documentation. About 100 of those families already have responded to the request, and a second letter went home Friday with those who hadn't responded. Parents have until Dec. 7 to respond.
Buist Academy is another of the five schools checking students' addresses. It accepts students from across the county but gives downtown residents, current students' siblings and those zoned to attend low-performing schools a better shot at acceptance. The school checked only whether students lived in the county, and some say that wasn't enough because they didn't see whether students who got into the school using a downtown address lived on the peninsula.
School Principal Sallie Ballard said last week that all but two students lived in the county, and those two cases hadn't been resolved yet.
Families at Ashley River Creative Arts Elementary, C.E. Williams Middle and Jennie Moore Elementary should receive letters this week about the verification process that will happen at their schools. Parents will have to submit the required documents by Dec. 6.
The schools will use the same process to request and verify information from parents. Officials will call parents who don't return the necessary documentation, and district Chief Academic Officer Randy Bynum said he hopes a second letter won't be necessary.
It's important that the district continue verifying addresses because the board has a policy on it, he said. "We want to do this process accurately and fairly and in accordance with the policy."
Reach Diette Courrégé at 937-5546 or dcourrege@ postandcourier.com.
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Comments
majorjohnson (anonymous) says...
Again, this would never happen in private schools. And now, with schools being paid for at the state rather than local level, there is less reason than ever to spend good money making sure that a child who attends a school is from the right zone. Government bureaucracy flexing it's muscle for no reason other than because it can is what we have here. Public schools are about bureaucratic rules and spreading the mediocrity, not educating children.
November 18, 2007 at 8:34 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
mlm (anonymous) says...
Neighborhood schools belong to neighborhood students first. Good for St. Andrews School for finally looking out for its neighborhood. Shame on CCSD for covering up this major taxpayer abuse by putting this off for so long. At the very least CCSD should have made this possible before school started.
What this report doesn't say is that the false addresses and admissions cheaters at Buist Academy are what brought this to the surface. St. Andrews is a great school with a high demand for admission. It has an obligation to serve its residents first. If too many students are attending the school then it has an obligation to remove those who don't live in the neighborhood, didn't participate in the lottery or who weren't legally approved to transfer in. CCSD was finally forced to abide by state law (this isn't a new policy) which it has ignored for years.
This is what is supposed to be happening at Buist, but instead they give us a red herring by checking for out of county students. Don't just seek out the eleven Daniel Island parents who cheated to get their child into Buist, tell us about the many dozens, if not a hundred, who falsified a neighborhood address to qualify for a lottery slot they weren't entitled to or who jumped the waiting list altogether. Asking the Buist Academy staff to check themselves is like asking the fox to count the chickens.
Good for St. Andrews School's leadership; bad for Buist Academy's continued deceit.
November 18, 2007 at 11:04 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
Reader (anonymous) says...
As for Buist, I agree that there needs to be more vigorous checking of addresses at the time of enrolling, but I'm not sure that it makes sense afterwards. For example, if Student X had been admitted as a sibling of a current student and two years later, his sibling drops dead or graduates, Student X is not removed, right? Completely leaving the county is a different matter because of state law (which is why Buist is checking for county residence), but just losing the original qualification is not relevant, or is it?
November 18, 2007 at 1:06 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
mlm (anonymous) says...
The sibling issue, as "Reader" describes it, is also a red herring. The parents who cheated on their child's admissions application from the start by using false addresses, the ones that gladly took a District 20 slot but then decided to leave (and decided not to reapply for a county-wide slot instead) and the ones who cheated with their first child & then won a slot for their second child as a "sibling"...they all have to go. Fair is fair and cheating with the blessing of CCSD officials is unacceptable. St. Andrew's officials have integrity; Buist officials are showing a level of honesty & fairness anywhere near what other magnet schools are doing.
What's missing altogether in this story is that administrators over Buist from top CCSD officials on down, including the principal who knew what they were doing was cheating, they should have to go, too. Why just penalize the parents for getting caught. Why not remove the CCSD employees who told them how to do it and then looked the other way?
November 18, 2007 at 1:36 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
majorjohnson (anonymous) says...
This is exactly the kind of nit picking bureaucratic crap that leaves us with uneducated kids. The people running the schools are counting beans, figuring out how much money they can finagle per bean, making sure all the beans came out of the right bag, beans beans beans...
If the state would just say here's a bag of money tied to this child for education, the parent gets to choose where the kid goes, this crap would go away because schools would want that kid instead of excluding this bean or insisting that bean go here. If Buist or James Island were good enough they would have tons of kids from all over attending, and they would have the money to educate them all. They sure wouldn't be paying people to visit a beans house to figure out if they live in the right place.
On top of that if the money were for each child's education period, all of these developers would be including schools in their developments to sell their new neighborhoods, and they would have to be decent schools or people wouldn't use them. The kids could walk to the school right there in their neighborhood instead of being bussed to the local government facility they are assigned to. Businesses can't afford to act like government...they'd go broke. When government acts like this they just raise taxes. No private school anywhere pays a team of employees to make sure the kids live in the right area, as long as the kid gets to school and wants an education they don't care if the kid is from the other side of the state.
Anyone who thinks the government can do it better than business should be advocating government take over dry cleaning and donut shops...but they know they'd have dirty torn up clothes and $10 donuts.
November 18, 2007 at 3:41 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
mlm (anonymous) says...
majorjohnson, why don't you go back to the military where you came from? You obviously don't understand market driven economies. To be both profitable and sustainable market economies must depend on the presence of high quality & well maintained public infrastructures...like public schools. Poor infrastructure eventually lowers market standards and pofitability in the private sector. Charleston isn't a tourist oriented fishing village, but the way our schools are performing, we're well on our way to becoming one...whether the private sector wants it or not.
November 18, 2007 at 4:11 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
majorjohnson (anonymous) says...
Hey mlm...why don't you go back to school...and I don't mean the socialist indoctrination center where you learned economics. Charleston is indeed a tourist oriented fishing village...the vast majority of Charlestons infrastructure is funded by tourism. This is hardly a hub of industry and education in case you haven't noticed. The school system here is not sucking intellectual property from other states or countries. We aren't silicon valley, we're sweetgrass valley. Frankly I'm a computer programmer and work from my little back porch on my little farm out in the country, so I couldn't give a rats ass if you people in Charleston depend on tourists for your jobs and your children get just enough education to clean toilets and serve french fries.
I do worry that there are kids who could do what I do who are being shoved into crap schools on my tax dollar by people who want to defend public bureaucracy and couldn't give a rats ass about these kids being educated. You want to cry about public schools, but you wouldn't give a thimble of warm spit about any child's education but yours...
I don't have any children, I'd rather eat my young than let them grow up here, but at least I care about every kid, not just yours. If we had a real education system instead of a system that just perpetuated a really crappy government education bureaucracy maybe we could actually have jobs for the few people who manage to get out of school with a diploma. Take that and stick it in your socialist pipe and have a puff.
November 18, 2007 at 6:16 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
mlm (anonymous) says...
Couldn't possibly have illustrated my point any better than that.
November 18, 2007 at 6:31 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
gencon1 (anonymous) says...
mlm doesn't have a clue. "You obviously don't understand market driven economies. To be both profitable and sustainable market economies must depend on the presence of high quality & well maintained public infrastructures... like public schools." Are you kidding me? Government schools are a total failure. mlm, keep your kids in the government indoctrination schools, they can work for my kids when they maybe graduate.
November 18, 2007 at 6:50 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
gencon1 (anonymous) says...
Get the government out of the education business.
November 18, 2007 at 6:50 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
captaincrunch (anonymous) says...
As a product of public schools in South Carolina, I believe they are a worthy cause. If not for my public school education, I may not have had the opportunity to practice law, manage a business, or own my own home. More importantly, as a product of public schools I was exposed to a variety of people of different class, races and religions. We shared different opinions on many issues, but we listened and learned from one another. And many of us have remained friends through the years.
I firmly believe that that socialization is a significant advantage that the private schools cannot offer because of the natural tendency of people to segregate themselves apart from others that are different. I also believe that the understanding about people I gained from that exposure was fundamental to my success. That was my experience in public schools - they weren't perfect but I've yet to see any institution (public or private) that is.
November 18, 2007 at 9:39 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
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