House assigned to bad schools, need to attend better schools.

My aunt lives in a house that is assigned to bad schools, and she has a 7-year-old daughter so it’s a major concern. Nearly 30% of the teachers are considered “inexperienced” at my cousin’s elementary school, and the local middle and high schools rank very poorly as well. They live in Anne Arundel County, Maryland and their house is assigned to Hebron-Harman Elementary/MacArthur Middle/Meade High. We were considering transferring my cousin, who is a rising first grader at Harman ES to schools in the Severna Park or Broadneck High School cluster. My aunt also lives right next to the Howard County border and lives super close to really good schools over there, but I imagine that transferring to a school in another county is nearly impossible.

Even when it comes to schools within the local county (Anne Arundel), a few issues come up:

• Maryland is one of the few states in the country that does not have open enrollment. I read somewhere that in most states, parents are very easily able to choose what schools their children attend provided that the schools they are choosing from are within the county/school district they live. In Maryland, houses are strictly assigned to one elementary, middle, and high school, and in most cases unless you opt for private, charter, or homeschooling, then your child is forced to attend only those schools. Within the public school system, those are their only options.
• Although there is no open enrollment, they do have “out-of-area transfers” (OOATs) for parents who want to send their child to a school in their county/school district that their home is not assigned to. Basically, parents can fill out a form and if they provide a specific reason as to why their child needs to be transferred, then the county will approve it as long as the school is under 90% capacity. However, the caveat is that the school system only approves such transfers for very limited reasons: medical reasons, extreme bullying, student safety related, and if the parent works for the school. Saying “my house is assigned to schools that don’t have a good quality education” is not a reason that will be approved by school system.
• Some schools within the clusters we want to transfer her to are above 90% capacity and are thus closed. For example, many of the elementary schools and the two middle schools within the Broadneck High School cluster are open for OOATs, but Broadneck High School itself is at nearly 100% capacity and thus closed for OOATs. Severna Park schools are all under capacity and open, but I fear that may change by the time my cousin reaches the high school level.
• The deadline for out-of-area transfers for Anne Arundel County already passed nearly a month ago. Due to everything with the pandemic, we had other issues to address and we also didn’t realize just how bad the education quality is at her assigned schools until recently.

We really don’t know what to do. We don’t want my cousin to continue to go to a school that’s so low quality, but my aunt and her husband are not in the best financial situation right now (especially due to the pandemic) so I’m not sure if moving to a house in another school district is even feasible right now, especially because houses in good school districts are pricey. My parents live within the Broadneck cluster and they could use our address. We also have relatives in Davidsonville and Bethesda, which also have good public schools, but we don’t want to fake addresses because that is considered a crime that can come with terrible consequences. It just feels hopeless. Maryland counties have a huge red-lining and segregation issue where they congregate really expensive houses in one part of the county where mostly wealthy white people live and over-develop other parts of the county with lower priced houses, and these areas have worse schools because school funding is determined by property taxes. It’s really messed up because the schools in the poorer areas have lots of ethnic minority students, too, and the class segregation is making the school systems here plagued with racial inequities as well.

I don’t think my aunt and her husband would be able to move houses. They took out a mortgage on a house they can’t really afford. They’ve been making all their rent payments, but they barely get by and owe a lot of money to credit cards and the house. Their house is worth about 570-620,000 dollars and they purchased it in 2005. I don’t know if there is any possible way they can get out of it and be able to sell the house and move somewhere else. If they were going to go into debt on a house, they should have made sure it was in an area that had good schools first. They obviously can not afford private school tuition either. I am considering having my aunt contact the school system and ask if them if there’s any way she can still submit an OOAT form, but I’m still worried it would get denied because of the strict criteria required for approval. I don’t even know what she could list as the reasoning. We don’t know what to do anymore, but we know my cousin needs a better education. I apologize for the length of this post, but this is a very complicated situation and if anyone knows how to move forward and get my cousin to be able to attend better schools, that would be much more appreciated. I would also love to hear input from those who have been in a similar position. Thanks in advance!

Submitted July 12, 2020 at 09:51PM by Yamnaya https://ift.tt/38NwPt9