ACPS Enrollment Policy Peeves Parents

Alexandria parents are concerned over a school system policy that could—in a worst-case scenario—prevent their children from attending their neighborhood school and limit their school choices.

The Modified Open Enrollment policy is in its third year but a March 9 letter from Alexandria City Public Schools to parents of rising kindergarteners sparked a frenzy of concern.

While the letter was intended as informational, notifying parents how to find their “home school” and directing them to produce certain required registration documents, the last paragraph reads, in part: “If a school exceeds capacity for kindergarten prior to June 15, then all kindergarten applicants will enter a lottery for random selection. Every student will be placed in the home school until all slots are filled according to rank. The remainder will be re-assigned to another nearby or contiguous school.”

The policy was designed to ensure that ACPS could keep kindergarten class sizes small for a better learning environment. An ACPS kindergarten class is capped at about 20 students, the smallest class size for this age group in the region.

The MOE policy is in effect for grade levels K-5, but students already attending a school are allowed to stay at that school—only new students coming into a school are subject to the policy, which is why it affects kindergarteners greatly.

“We were looking for a fair way to address overcrowding and that’s what this policy intends to do,” said ACPS spokeswoman Kelly Alexander. “Overall, we will try our best to make sure that all students who register for kindergarten are able to register for their home school. …We want to be able to put students in their home school but we have to have something in place in case of overcrowding.”

Superintendent Morton Sherman said in an email sent to many ACPS community members: “We take great pride in the way we have implemented the MOE policy and regulations, even as we would much prefer to have sufficient space throughout the school division to have no need for this process. We have not used a lottery, as is mentioned in the policy; we continue to be optimistic that we will not have to use a lottery this spring.”

Kelly Adams, an Alexandria parent and realtor, says she has concerns with the current policy.

“I have concerns with children being placed out of their home district,” she told Patch. “I see so many people leaving this awesome city, selling a house in Del Ray or Rosemont and moving down the parkway [to Fairfax] or to Arlington” because of this type of ACPS policy.

Additionally, the policy mandates that administrative transfer requests, which allow parents to ask ACPS that their child attend a school other than his home school, will be considered after final enrollment projections are made, or after June 15. Enrollment begins April 9.

This part of the policy peeves some parents partly because it means the school system is not operating on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Adams said when she’s helping others buy and sell homes, some parents tell her that they want the ability to choose which school their child attends and if the child is not admitted into the preferred school, the deadline for private schools has passed by the ACPS June 15 deadline.

Additionally, parents seek assurance that the neighborhood where they buy a house will offer them the ability to send their child to school there or allow them to submit a transfer form to another ACPS school if their home school has not met certain test scores or for other reasons.

“I don’t think ACPS is intentionally limiting parents’ choices, but I think it limits parents’ choices by having that registration deadline,” Adams said. She suggested lifting the caps on kindergarten class size as one possible solution to accommodate more kids—a move not everyone favors.

Sherman explained in an email: “The rationale for not using the first come, first served approach was to avoid potential ‘3 am wait lines’ to register children. The fairness of keeping an open window for registration was a key discussion when the policy was first created. ...One of the conclusions was that an open registration process during a window of time would avoid some families not able to get to the early lines of registration for any number of reasons (e.g., what if a child were sick that day?).”

He also noted that he’s been asked by several School Board members to “look at the June 15 date to see if there should be a change.”

The School Board will review the Modified Open Enrollment policy at its March 22 meeting.