Latest news with #TimDeRoche
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Top LAUSD Schools with Empty Seats Shut Out Needy Students, Report Says
Dozens of highly-rated Los Angeles Unified schools in wealthy neighborhoods have empty seats — but most students can't access them, according to a new analysis of state enrollment data. 'Crisis in the School House,' a 36-page report published by Available To All, a nonpartisan nonprofit led by Tim DeRoche, an author and parent who lives in Los Angeles, draws on official attendance data for LAUSD's zoned elementary schools for the years 1995 to 2024. Among the 456 LAUSD elementary schools examined in the report, enrollment is down 46% from their peak over the last two decades, while over half of these schools have seen enrollment decline by over 50%. The decline has left a lot of open space in 39 high-performing schools, but that doesn't mean LA students are filling them, according to DeRoche's analysis. In fact, he and his team found nearly 7,000 empty seats in the sought-after schools. DeRoche said that leaves a lot of empty seats at those schools and others like them. For example, high-scoring Ivanhoe Elementary in Silverlake enrolled 432 students in 2024, down from its peak of 467 students, leaving 35 empty seats, according to DeRoche's analysis. Overland Elementary in West L.A. enrolled just 488 students, down from its peak of 557. Lanai Road Elementary in Encino had ten empty seats, according to the report. Under state law, traditional district schools are required to offer available seats to any LAUSD student who lives outside of the school's attendance zone. LAUSD officials disputed the findings and methodology of 'Crisis in the School House,' saying its use of peak enrollment to measure school capacity is inaccurate, because those schools were overcrowded then. DeRoche admitted his measurements were imperfect but said the gist of his analysis stuck. Given the fact that most kids in L.A. attend lower-performing schools, and that the district is shrinking dramatically with no end in sight, DeRoche wants the district to open those high-performing schools up by reassessing enrollment zones. 'We're trying to work for a system in which there's more equitable access to these really coveted public schools, and it's not based on your wealth,' said DeRoche, who wrote a book on U.S. attendance zones. DeRoche's critique of admissions comes as LAUSD is contracting. Since the pandemic, the district has lost more than 70,000 students. Current enrollment sits at 408,083, down from a peak of 746,831 in 2002. Decades of shrinking classes recently prompted L.A. school board president Scott Schmerelson to say district leadership needs to start talking about closing or combining schools, something that some other big U.S. cities are already doing. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has countered with a proposal to close down unused parts of school campuses while keeping schools operational, a tactic LAUSD is already deploying at some campuses. 'Crisis in the School House' focuses in part on a group of L.A.'s two-dozen top-scoring traditional district elementary schools. The report's analysis of enrollment data for last year shows those schools had room for at least 4,306 more students. In addition, the report found almost 3,000 additional seats in district-run charter schools. But just four district schools reported only 58 open seats in the district's Open Enrollment system for incoming students, DeRoche said. The upshot is that kids, including those most in need, are shut out of good schools, said DeRoche, something he's seen happen in other districts around the country. Like those of other districts, Los Angeles schools post uneven scores on state exams, with lower-income, mostly minority schools earning lower marks. This matters, said DeRoche, because it perpetuates cycles of poverty and hands an unfair advantage to the wealthy. Of the 456 LAUSD neighborhood elementary schools in DeRoche's study, just 39 managed to get 70% or more of students reading at grade level. In those 39 schools, 45% of the students were white, while the other 417 schools in the study were only 7% white. In an interview, LAUSD's senior executive director of strategy and innovation Derrick Chau said DeRoche also failed to account for important programs that are serving district students, such as magnet schools. 'We do have programs that have been and continue to be in high demand,' said Chau. 'The reality is, as a system, we are recalibrating across the board on how to deal with changing enrollments.' Chau said the district is pursuing a number of tactics to boost enrollment in schools and also ensure seats in sought-after schools are distributed in a fair and equitable manner. 'I think we just need to readjust our system to make sure that we look at those programs, replicate them, and bring them to more students,' he said.
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Report: Missouri Attendance Boundaries Discriminate Against Low-Income Students
As Missouri lawmakers debate open enrollment for a fifth consecutive year, a new report is shedding light on how public school residency restrictions can discriminate against low-income students. The report, published Wednesday by the nonprofit watchdog group Available to All, finds that Missouri has some of the strictest school residential assignment policies in the nation. District attendance boundaries mirror historic racist housing redlining maps and are limiting student access to high-performing schools, said Tim DeRoche, the organization's founder. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter 'Whenever the government assigns children to public schools, then the government also takes on the role of excluding those children from other public schools — that's where the split starts to get problematic,' DeRoche said. 'In Missouri, there's just very strict assignment-based policies in districts. It's very hard to cross district lines in Missouri as opposed to other states.' Available to All's report estimated that 94% to 96% of Missouri public school students attend their assigned school, based on their home address. State law has limited exceptions, such as if a student is homeless, parents pay property taxes at another location or a school loses accreditation. Related The lack of ability for students to easily transfer schools inside or outside their district encourages wealthy families to buy houses next to high-quality schools, DeRoche said. 'It creates this very strict system where kids, especially low-income kids and low-income kids of color, get locked into struggling or failing schools, and the families have very few options to find another home for them,' he said. DeRoche said the boundaries on redlining maps that were drawn a century ago to determine who got access to government-insured home mortgages largely correspond to the state's school attendance lines. 'Parts of towns that have high concentrations of people of color or immigrants or working-class folks are excluded' from receiving that sort of housing assistance, DeRoche said. 'We found three examples where the school zone in Missouri overlaps or mirrors the pattern on redlining maps from 80 to 90 years ago.' One school attendance boundary cited by the report runs north to south through St. Louis. Children living east of the line are assigned to the St. Louis City School District, where roughly 20% of students score proficient or better on state reading and math tests. Children located west of the line are assigned to Clayton School District, where nearly 75% of students are proficient or better on the same exams. The boundary, according to the report, 'mirrors the pattern of the racist redlining map created by the federal government in 1937.' In the St. Joseph School District, Field Elementary School — located near an area described as a 'choice part of the city' in redlining maps — has significantly higher math and reading proficiency rates than Lindbergh Elementary School, located 2 miles away. The Lindbergh neighborhood was described in redlining maps as 'a poor area and one which lenders avoid,' according to the report. Related A 2024 analysis by New America, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C., found this line is among the 100 most segregating district borders in the nation in terms of poverty rate disparity among school-aged children. Because of the steep inequality across district boundaries, DeRoche said, it's not uncommon for parents to lie about where they live to give their child an education at a higher-performing school. Schools in Missouri — and across the nation, he said — often investigate students' residences to find families that aren't living within district boundaries. These inspections are conducted by school officials, teachers or even private investigators hired by the district, according to the Available to All report. A 2023 investigation by St. Louis Public Radio and Midwest Newsroom found the Hazelwood School District, which enrolls roughly 16,000 students in suburban St. Louis, performed 2,051 residency investigations during the 2022-23 school year. In 2018-19, the district conducted just 148. Parents can be charged with a misdemeanor for falsifying their children's enrollment records, according to Missouri state law. State Rep. Brad Pollitt has been trying to expand school choice in Missouri with open enrollment bills for the last five years. He reintroduced his proposal again this year in hopes it will finally make it to the state Senate floor. Related HB711, the Public School Open Enrollment Act, would allow any K-12 student to attend a school in a nonresident district, depending on factors including disciplinary and attendance records, the school's student-to-teacher ratio, class sizes and building capacity. Only 3% of a district's students would be allowed to leave each year. According to reporting from the Missouri Independent, the bill doesn't require school districts to accept students living outside the area, but districts that do would receive extra funding. DeRoche said Available to All recommends that Missouri require districts to enroll children from outside their boundaries when schools have space available. 'School finance policies should ensure that education dollars can flow across district lines, enabling Missouri families to access the public schools that they feel are the right fit for their children,' the report says. It also recommends that schools reserve a specific percentage of seats for students who live outside the district. 'There's an opportunity for reform,' DeRoche said. 'We don't take a stand on individual bills, but there is a chance [to create] best practices in protecting equal access to public schools.'
