Tampabay: School choice comes calling

Today marks the first full day of phone calls to the 1,270 students who did not get any of their choices for attending school this fall. Parents will be offered places in other schools that still have room and need to balance racial ratios.

On Monday, student assignment director Kathy Walker gathered the staff members who will be making the phone calls and trained them for what could be an unpleasant job.

Walker wrote these words in tall red letters on a sheet of paper: "I am calling you because your child did not receive one of her choices made during the application period."

That's part of the script. The callers will be quick to explain why they're calling and what the parents' options are, however limited.

The callers spent most of Monday learning how to answer the parents' questions.

"We don't want to sound cold and institutional," Walker said. At the same time, she said, "You don't have time to get warm and conversational like you're old college buddies. You need to get off the phone and clinch the deal."

The phone calls are one of the toughest parts of the new choice process. The district asked parents to choose up to five schools in order of preference. Now the district has to tell more than 1,200 kids that they didn't get any of their choices.

"It's going to be tough," said School Board member Lee Benjamin. "We're going to have parents who come before us and say, "I thought we got to choose.' "

So far, it looks as if most parents did get to choose.

Of the 18,954 kids who entered the choice process, 14,521 -- or 77 percent -- got their first choice. Another 1,936, or 10 percent, got their second choice.

Another 83,000 chose to remain in their old school by exercising their grandfathering rights.

But not all parents could get their choice. Some picked popular schools and competed with many other parents for limited seats.

And race played a big factor in kids being left out of schools they wanted. Under an agreement with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that gave birth to the choice plan, for the next four years, no schools can have more than 42 percent African-American students.

If parents all got their choices, Pinellas schools would be resegregated to an extent not seen in 30 years, with a number of predominantly black schools in St. Petersburg south of Central Avenue.

As a result of the district's efforts to keep schools desegregated and limits on how many students each school can hold, less than 7 percent of parents did not get any of their choices.

Now it is up to Walker and her staff to reach those parents. Walker wrote again with her red marker: "We must hear from you AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, as we are continuing to call other parents to assign seats."

If a parent is unwilling or unable to make a quick choice, the caller is supposed to explain that the remaining seats will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

The callers were provided Monday with a list of schools that still need students. At some schools that were underchosen, race doesn't matter. But at many south county schools, it does.

For instance, Campbell Park Elementary has nine spots still available in kindergarten.

Here's how it works: There are 31 kids in Campbell Park's kindergarten class already, and the listed capacity is 40. But 17 are black children. That number is well above the limit of 42 percent. So there is no more room for black children. If the callers can get nine more white kids into kindergarten at Campbell Park, the percentage of black kids will decrease to an acceptable level.

Such is the cold calculus of the choice plan.

When the trained callers contact black students in Area A, the available elementary schools are 74th Street, Clearview, John Sexton, Lynch, Rio Vista, Sawgrass Lake, Shore Acres, Tyrone, Westgate and Woodlawn. The available middle schools are Meadowlawn and Riviera.

When they call nonblack students, the available elementary schools are Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo, North Shore, Northwest and two new schools, Jamerson and Sanderlin. The available middle schools are Bay Point and the new Thurgood Marshall.

After the 1,270 families are contacted and their children are placed, the district will move on to the next step: assigning the 8,578 kids whose parents didn't fill out a choice application. After that is done in the next couple of weeks, the district will send out letters to all parents, including those who got their first choices.

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