Luci Scott, The Republic
At 4 p.m. on a Friday in mid-January, Yong Ming Liu appeared outside the offices of Chandler Unified School District, a spot he kept in the cold for three nights and two days.
“I slept in my car Friday night and Sunday night,” said Liu, a professor of mechanical engineering at Arizona State University.
Liu and the nearby men in line saved each others places as they left for breaks during their vigil.
Liu was there to gain a coveted spot for his son at a school of his choice as soon as open enrollment began the following Monday morning.
As soon as he registered his son for kindergarten at Chandler Traditional Academy-Independence, he was heading to the airport to fly to a conference in Washington, D.C. He had changed his airline ticket from Sunday and delayed his business in D.C. for a half day to gain a spot in CTA for his son, who is in preschool at New Vistas, a private school.
CTA-Independence has a good reputation, Liu said, and “it’s less expensive and closer.”
The school, which has a traditional curriculum and students clad in uniforms, rates a score of 10 out of a possible 10 on the website greatschools.org.
In Arizona, parents may send their children to schools outside the boundaries of their neighborhood and even out of the districts in which they reside.
Arizona ranks fifth in the nation for school choice, according to the Center for Education Reform, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that rates states on what the center calls “parent power,” or access to quality options and information.
The center praises Arizona for scholarships for students with disabilities, a strong charter-school law, the availability of online learning, transparency and ease of obtaining information on choices, and the convenience of voting for members of the state’s 227 local school boards during the general elections in November.
In the Chandler district of 41,556 students, one-third are attending a school outside their home-school boundaries; that is 10,007 who live within CUSD and 3,877 who live outside the district. The schools with the most boundary exceptions are Perry High, with 935 students attending from outside its boundary, and Chandler High, with 912.
The district does not keep tabs on the number of students living in the district but attending a non-district school.
“There is no obligation from a family to notify the district that they are choosing a school outside of CUSD whether it be a nearby district school other than CUSD, private school or charter school,” district spokesman Terry Locke said.
In Tempe Elementary District, 2,511 of its 11,720 students live within the district but go to a school outside their attendance boundary, and 1,998 live outside the district but attend a district school.
In Kyrene School District, 3,768 of the 17,874 students live outside the district.
The trend also applies in the Tempe Union High School District. At Mountain Pointe High in Ahwatukee, for example, more than 50 percent of its roughly 2,600 students last school year were from outside Mountain Pointe boundaries.
Kara Kerwin, president of the Center for Education Reform, described Arizona as a “hotbed of reform.”
She said, “When parents have access to options and good information about schools, all schools do better. It’s a ripple effect.”
Kerwin, when asked why Arizona ranks fifth in the nation for parent power but ranks low nationally in academic achievement, said that only a small percentage of students are participating in choice.
“There’s much more work to be done,” Kerwin said. “On the parent-power index, Arizona ranks at 80 percent. That’s still not an A. … There’s a huge gap between access to good options, and a huge achievement gap for most of the children in Arizona.”
Among those families taking advantage of choice at open enrollment at CUSD on Jan. 13 was that of Sara Fried, of Chandler, who arrived at 6:45 a.m. that Monday. She wanted to enroll her son in kindergarten in CTA-Liberty, CTA-Goodman or Hancock Elementary, all of which score 10 out of 10 on the website, which calculates parental opinions, test scores and grades.
“We wanted something rated high academically,” she said.
She lives within the boundary of Bologna Elementary School, but that school scores only 4 out of a possible 10 on greatschools.org, despite high praise written on the site by some parents.
Another parent in line, who arrived Monday morning before the district’s doors opened, was Nitin Deshpalde, an engineer at Intel, whose daughter was being enrolled in kindergarten at Chandler Traditional Academy-Goodman. She currently is at Bright Beginnings.
“I’ve heard CTA expects students to be well-educated, well-rounded,” Deshpalde said. “I’ve heard it has a good curriculum and teachers who are good people who care about children.”
Also in line was Vidya Sreekantham, who planned to enroll her daughter in third grade at CTA-Independence and take her out of Bright Beginnings.
“Independence is a more rigorous curriculum than Bright Beginnings,” said Sreekantham, a scientist at Caris Diagnostics.
“I hear it’s a good school, and it’s a couple of blocks away.”
Susan Avery of Chandler chose San Tan Junior High for her son, who will be in seventh grade. If he stayed within his boundaries, he would go to Willis Junior High, and Avery was adamant that he would not go there.
Willis Principal Jeff Delp said in a Feb. 5 e-mail that many families choose to send their children to Willis for its safe learning environment and to participate in its blended learning Innovation Academy and its gifted program.
“We serve an ethnically, economically and academically diverse student population by emphasizing three core values, the first one being that Willis is a place where everyone must feel safe and valued,” Delp said.