photo credit: SRCS
A map of elementary, middle, high and charter schools across the Santa Rosa City Schools district.

 The largest public school district in Sonoma County has changed how it handles interdistrict transfers, a move that’s already reshaping enrollment across the region. Santa Rosa City Schools is now denying most requests from families who want their children to attend schools outside Santa Rosa. KRCB's Shandra Back speaks with Dale Dougherty at the Sebastopol Times who has been covering this on-going story and the effects and underlying factors of this controversial shift. 

KRCB: I want to start out by talking about within interdistrict transfers, there’s a change in policy. Can you explain a little bit about what that is?

DOUGHERTY: Well, there’s a change in policy of the Santa Rosa City Schools district. They began to refuse interdistrict transfers, to allow their students that live in their district to go outside the district to other schools.

KRCB: And when did that happen?

DOUGHERTY: This year. Really in the late fall that it began.

KRCB: And the reason behind it is their own budget deficit, right?

DOUGHERTY: And it really comes down to this broader problem of declining enrollment in all schools at all levels throughout the United States, not just our immediate area. And half of that is driven by some demographics, such as fewer kids, and with housing prices what they are, we have fewer families moving here with kids.

So that’s responsible for a part of the decline. But the other side of it is there’s more options for educating your child. That includes charter schools, private schools, homeschooling. So not everybody is going to their school. And so there’s a significant homeschooling population in West County.

But what happens here — which is kind of interesting — is West County schools have, for years, a number of them became charter schools so that they could get kids in elementary and middle school going to West County schools. They could get kids from Santa Rosa into their schools without even requiring approval from Santa Rosa.

KRCB: Is this because enrollment was previously down in the West County schools?

DOUGHERTY: Yeah. Well, they saw their own decline. They had a good reputation as schools, so parents wanted to send their kids there.

But what happens in this particular instance that I write about is those kids that are going from Santa Rosa, going to West County schools like Twin Hills or Brook Haven, Willowside — when they go to high school, they want to follow their peers to the high school that the kids in West County are going to, which is Analy. And so Santa Rosa says, “No, you can’t.” 

KRCB: And so when we talk about the change in policy, why did that happen?

DOUGHERTY: Well, Santa Rosa’s schools is really having an existential challenge — will it be able to survive? It’s had a very high budget deficit for a lot of reasons, but the basic driver of revenue for schools is student attendance. And not just enrollment, but they actually have to show up and be in the class, so it’s called average daily attendance. So they know if they’re losing students, they’re losing revenue.

KRCB: So an interdistrict transfer means students are leaving the Santa Rosa City Schools.

DOUGHERTY: Yes. They’re leaving and going to a different school, and the money follows them. So that, I think, is the key thing. Now, the real challenge, I think, for some of the parents is that the Santa Rosa City Schools board is having to make pretty drastic decisions to keep the schools alive.

They’re consolidating middle school and high school into campuses that really weren’t designed to have middle schoolers on. They don’t have separate bathrooms. They don’t have separate lunch facilities. So last year, around this time, when Santa Rosa was going through this, they made projections about enrollment for the school year we’re in now. And my understanding is they were projecting a certain number of students, but they lost — I’ve heard — 500 families. Some say it’s a lot more than that.

KRCB: Is that the school district putting out those numbers?

DOUGHERTY: I’ve heard it from the teachers’ union, but we can kind of tell from enrollments. I mean, 500 students is a lot of money, right? And so if you made your budget projections for this year and you take away 500 students, you’re taking away millions of dollars. Their budget deficit grew because of maybe the lack of support and faith in their school system by parents who decided to leave. And so they want to prevent them from leaving so they don’t lose that money.

KRCB: And what does this mean for the schools in West County that have relied on those transfer students?

DOUGHERTY: Well, in this spring, they initially were doing projections with a lot lower number of students coming from Santa Rosa. And that, for them, means millions of dollars that they have to take out of their budget that they don’t have for teachers and other things. They’re in a really difficult position to make these decisions to have to cut services and at the same time trying to maintain confidence in the school’s ability to educate children.

And I quote one of the leaders of the teachers’ union saying, “Really, do you want to punish parents who want to go outside the district? Do you want to punish them for choosing what they think is a better school?”

KRCB: And so from the schools’ perspective, it’s really about competing for just less of a pool of students at this point, it sounds like.

DOUGHERTY: Yeah. In other words, they used to do studies — they still do them — but say, you know, how many eighth graders or how many sixth graders, how many fourth graders are out there and what is our enrollment projection going to look like? But if you’re not getting 100% of those students, but you’re getting 80% or 60%, that’s kind of the state that West County schools look at it as: if we’re only getting 60% of the kids in our area even, we have to replace them or we just need to shrink considerably.

Dale Dougherty, co-owner of the Sebastopol Times, is a donor and volunteer at the Academy of Innovative Arts in Forestville, which includes interdistrict and intradistrict transfer students.