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How can Cedar Rapids school district address outbound open enrollment trend?
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It’s no secret that students have been leaving the Cedar Rapids Community School District. On Monday, the school board finally got a glimpse of why.
At the board’s regular meeting, Executive Administrator of Instructional Services Sandy Stephen presented the results of a survey gauging responses from 134 families whose children open enrolled out of the district for the 2011-12 school year.
Their responses represent only a portion of the 1,334 students who live within the Cedar Rapids boundaries but opt to attend school in another district. Of those students, 504 open enroll in order to remain in their former school district and they were not surveyed further.
The number one reason why families open enroll to another district is the Marion Independent School District’s Home School Assistance Program. Twenty percent of respondents cited it as their rationale. Convenience – such as proximity to work and home – was the second most popular explanation, which represented 17 percent of the responses. Size was the third most-frequent response at 13 percent, with half of those parents citing concerns about elementary classes being too big.
Of the surveyed families, 159 open enrolled into the Marion district and 132 selected to send their students to the Linn-Mar Community School District. College Community School District was the third largest pool of polled parents, with 75 families represented in the survey.
What do you think? What can the Cedar Rapids school district do to reverse the trend of outbound open enrollment?
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Why should the trend be reversed? If reducing class size is desirable this may be an effective way to accomplish it. Ohhh…, but teachers unions wouldn’t like that because it wouldn’t create a demand for more teachers.
Stop teaching the religion of evolution when dna studies show that its impossible for humans to have evolved from apes….hahahahahaha
The logic just doesn’t seem to make sense. Why are we talking about Open Enrollment as if it is the issue? The research reports that Cedar Rapids has about an average amount of students that Open Enrolled out of the District, significantly lower than Marion or even Linn Mar, and only a bit higher than Prairie.
YET… somehow Open Enrollment is killing Cedar Rapids and only Cedar Rapids? It would nice be able to compare incoming open enrollment between those districts as well, if nearly twice as many students are leaving Marion as are leaving CRCSD, where are they going? Where are all the Linn Mar and Prairie kids going?
It seems like an imagined controversy… why aren’t we talking about the fact that the City of Cedar Rapids has 3 school districts, and more of the population growth in the last 15 years has happened at the northern and southern edges of town, in Linn Mar or Community College districts?
Central Cedar Rapids lost like 5,000 people because of hte flood, but the community grew from 2000-2010. Some of them moved elsewhere within CRCSD, but a lot moved to other districts. On top of that, many of the new family homes built in the last twenty years, the households that would most likely have kids in K-12 education now, have been built at the periphery of the community, while homes in established neighborhoods tend to have older homeowners or tenants and therefore less likely to have school aged children.
Cedar Rapids is hardly unique, every city in the country is going through this… I bet if you went to Anamosa there would be more kids living in homes at the edge of town than the older homes right off downtown… it’s just that there isn’t an arbitrary school district line bi-secting that town.
Much of the migration continues to be housing related due to the flood. Its hard to quantify but its easy to observe still abandoned houses and lots by the dozen in major portions of the Cedar Rapids schools zone. The other two factors appear to be home schooling and class size. While it is easy to demonize teachers unions, but what we are really talking about are people…students and teachers. Demonize a union but it is that very union that believes in common sense measures like 18 kids to a teacher rather then packing them in like sardines. Call me crazy but lets see Fred or any other union demonizer manage 18 5th graders one day, then 30 the next and give back a common sense report on their findings. Betcha a years salary anyone with a brain will see that its not created demand but common sense and good for kids that we keep class sizes down.
The number of fifth graders I could handle is really beside the point. Why is it that educational achievement has continued to decline in spite of Governor Culver’s reduced class size initiative? And why all the hand ringing about parents exercising their freedom of choice in where and how they want their kids educated?
Education achievement in Iowa declining?
Short answer, Mr Hubler, is the unrealistic standards of No Child Left Behind and a forced over reliance on standardized tests.
If educational achievement in Iowa is declining, could you please explain why you think this is so?
The hand wringing?
We’ve had this thing about education going back to the beginnings of settlement in the 17th century. Education is considered a public good and those states that put an emphasis on public education (which Iowa did) did a whole lot better economically than those states (try Mississippi) that did not.
The Dedar Rapids school district, and this is obvious in the news report, wants to find out why students are transferring out of their neighborhood school in order to make the schools better. That’s not hand wringing.
As for homeschooling admittedly my experience with home schooled kids is limited but thus far I am not impressed, and in a couple of cases was downright horrified.