L. A. Schools to Review Effect of Transfers on Integration

A well-publicized campaign encouraging students to transfer to the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has prompted concern in the Los Angeles Unified School District that such transfers might lead to racial flight at some schools and harm the district’s integration efforts.

As a result, the Los Angeles district announced this week that it will take a closer look at all requests from students seeking to transfer out of the district.

The decision by the Los Angeles district is in response to a new state law making it easier for children from kindergarten through eighth grades to attend schools in districts where their parents work rather than where they live. The law, however, gives either district the right to refuse a request if it interferes with a court-ordered or voluntary integration plan or creates a financial hardship in the district.

Avoiding Conflict

“We don’t want the policy of granting permits for students to leave the district to interfere with our policy promoting integration,” said Los Angeles school board member Jackie Goldberg.

She asked for a review of district policy after learning that the Santa Monica-Malibu district had mounted a successful drive to bolster its sagging enrollment by recruiting 265 students whose parents work in the district but live elsewhere--mostly in Los Angeles. The new students will generate more than $600,000 in state revenues.

The Los Angeles district has routinely granted transfer requests from parents who, to facilitate child care, want their children to attend schools near their jobs. The district permitted more than 2,800 students to transfer to other districts last year and accepted about 1,400 students under agreements with 72 neighboring school districts.

The Los Angeles district never has reviewed the requests to determine how each transfer affects the racial balance at the student’s home school.

“I asked them to start tracking them (the requests) by schools,” Goldberg said. “The next step is to determine whether the district has the legal authority to ask the ethnicity of the child. I have asked for a legal opinion on that.” Permit requests do not require applicants to indicate ethnic background.

Goldberg said the district will refuse requests to transfer if the move tips the established ethnic ratios of 40% Anglo to 60% minority at some schools and 30% Anglo to 70% minority at others. The new policy will not apply to students who have already been issued permits.

In the Santa Monica-Malibu district, many officials took the decision to evaluate the transfer request as a sign that Los Angeles had placed a freeze on all requests. Los Angeles officials assured the district that permits were only being delayed.

Santa Monica-Malibu Supt. Eugene Tucker said: “We did not want to raid students from Los Angeles, that is why we set up the program the way we did” to attract only those students whose parents work in the Santa Monica-Malibu district.

He said that 60% of the students recruited to his are minorities.

“We understand that Los Angeles needs to review its policy and we want to cooperate as much as we can,” said Rita Esquivel, assistant to Tucker. “Two hundred kids is nothing to them, but it is the world to us. Financially, it puts us in a good situation.”

Esquivel said that the Santa Monica-Malibu district has plenty of room for students in its schools and child care facilities for those who wish to transfer.