LAUSD Suspends Student Transfer Ban, For Now

It won’t happen next year.

Superintendent Ramon Cortines announced on Tuesday that the Los Angeles Unified School District wouldn’t eliminate permits that allow LAUSD students to attend schools in outlying districts for the 2010-11 school year.

Instead, families who live within LAUSD’s boundaries but have inter-district transfer permits to opt into school systems such as Santa Monica-Malibu, Culver City or Beverly Hills can continue their educations in their public-school districts of choice for at least another year.

When the proposal surfaced in March, parents complained that students would have to say goodbye to classmates they’d had for years. The move would have forced students to abandon longstanding involvements with sports teams and extracurricular clubs, too. Echoing the complaints, the Board of Supervisors unanimously adopted Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s motion on March 30 asking Cortines and the LAUSD to reconsider the plan.

Cortines said he will continue to study the issue and will formulate a new policy in the future. Certainly the underlying financial problem of the permits remains unsolved. Because state school funding follows the student, LAUSD stands to lose the $51 million that flows out with the roughly 12,200 students enrolled in 99 other Southland school districts under the permit system.

And while Cortines must contend with LAUSD’s projected $640 million shortfall, the neighboring school districts have come to rely on the additional money the LAUSD students bring, which in some cases constitutes as much as 20% or more of their school funding.

Posted 4/7/2010