A few choice words for choice

Thousands of parents called the Pinellas district this week to protest their children's school assignments.

By THOMAS C. TOBIN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 20, 2003

Lisa Kothe of Safety Harbor opened the choice letter Saturday for her daughter and felt like tearing it up. It said 5-year-old Jenna had been assigned to attend Largo Central Elementary.

"I'd never even heard of it," Kothe said Wednesday. "I had to look on Yahoo maps to see where it was."

Seething, she called the school district's student assignment office, which told her that Largo Central had been her third choice.

Wrong, Kothe said.

Her third choice was Leila G. Davis Elementary School. She remembered her choices well. She had written them on a piece of paper.

Kothe is one of thousands of parents who have called the district this week to protest their children's school assignments for the next school year, the first under the controversial choice plan. More than 500 have filed formal appeals and hundreds more are expected to follow suit.

The district, its phone lines clogged by the blizzard of calls, has printed 2,000 appeal forms. The wave follows the district's massive mailing late last week to more than 35,000 students that included school assignments under the choice plan. Another 6,800 students were told the district is still working on where to put them.

"We've been inundated since Monday," said director of student assignment Kathy Walker, the besieged administrator whose name is at the bottom of each letter.

Some are ending their calls with a huff and a pledge to send their children to private school. Others say their next call is to their lawyer.

Most of the callers are simply disputing the choices they received, an outcome that won't be affected by an appeal, Walker said. Appeals, which must be filed within 10 days of the letter, are intended for instances in which the district made a clerical mistake or erred procedurally, she said.

Kothe's case appears to be easily rectified. Sometime today, Walker plans to review Kothe's original paperwork. If the district incorrectly entered her choices into the computer, Walker said, she will work hard to find a fair solution.

But she is limited, she said, by several factors. Before placing a student, she must determine if the school has room and how a child affects the racial ratios required under the court-mandated settlement that gave birth to the choice plan.

Kothe said she'll be happy with one of her top three choices. If that doesn't happen, she's got a backup plan that doesn't thrill her: keeping Jenna at a Montessori school in Tampa where the tuition tops $6,000.

The most common complaint is from parents who gave up their option to be "grandfathered" into their child's current school and tried to get a better one through the choice process. Now that their gamble has failed, they want to be grandfathered to the current school, but many don't realize they long ago gave up that right, Walker said.

Others wonder how a neighbor got into the neighborhood school and they were shut out. The answer: Students were assigned random numbers, which the choice computer used to make selections. A variety of other factors came into play, including a student's proximity to the school they chose, the schools' capacity and their racial balance. In cases where siblings were being placed, keeping families together was a top priority.

"For the most part they're angry, they're befuddled," Walker said of the parents who are calling. "They want to be courteous but they're very anxious. . . . They want what they want because it's for their child."

Some parents are demanding elaborate analyses of the computer run. Others who didn't get any of their five choices are demanding to be placed higher on the waiting list than those who didn't get their first two choices. Walker said dividing the list like that would be too specialized a task and that the list is fair.

The district is investigating hundreds of instances in which students were not placed in the same school with a sibling -- a major priority under the choice plan. In many of those cases the district erred, Walker said. "I know we've got to own up to that."

Meanwhile, some Pinellas private schools this week are fielding calls from parents left wanting by choice. Countywide, however, the demand has been limited, perhaps because nearly 90 percent of the students got what they wanted, either by grandfathering into their current school or getting one of their first two choices.

At Countryside Montessori in Clearwater, head of school Ted Gillette reported a 50 percent increase in demand by parents over the last three months. He attributes most of it to parents' uncertainty about choice.

Karen Deakley at Wellington School in Seminole, where the tuition is $6,295, estimated that 10 to 20 families had called Monday morning from many areas of the county.

"We've had a flood of calls -- many people that we've never heard from before," she said.

At Pinellas County Jewish Day School, principal Pauling Rohrmann said two families called this week to apply. She suspects they were dissatisfied with their choice school. Tuition averages about $7,200, but the new enrollees seemed resigned to private school.

"They were disappointed," Rohrmann said. "But not super upset."

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