Given a green light by federal law, state exemptions and local transfer policies, hundreds of students are flocking from neighborhood campuses in the Santa Rosa City Schools to surrounding districts as far away as Sebastopol, Kenwood and beyond.
Still others are choosing charter schools that cater to specific wants.
Within Santa Rosa, the trend is pushing its way into the city's five high schools, deepening the racial and economic divide in an increasingly segregated school system.
More than 20 percent of elementary and middle-school students in Santa Rosa don't attend their neighborhood school as parents shop campuses, examine test scores and debate choices. For seventh- and eighth-graders, more than four out of 10 bypass their neighborhood school to attend another campus.
"A lot of parents are just moving out so they don't have to go to the school they don't deem worthy," said Francisco Vazquez, professor of interdisciplinary studies at Sonoma State University's Hutchins School of Liberal Studies. "Short of a police state and forcing people to stay in a district, I don't know what the choices are."
Districts, hungry for students, hold open houses, buy ads and encourage campus walk-throughs.
At stake is the $5,000 to $6,000 in annual state funding linked with every student who enrolls, so districts promote their numbers and programs in an attempt to lure parents into a crosstown drive that will either mean a financial boost or shore up enrollment leaks.
"It's competition," said Ron Calloway, superintendent of the Mark West School District, where a third of the district's 1,428 students in 2009-10 came from outside of the district.
When a district loses students, whether through aging neighborhoods or transfers, the state funding goes with them, leaving officials faced with the prospect of cutting programs or increasing class sizes to offset the loss. That, in turn, can lead to more families transferring out.
Supporters of choice say parents ought to have freedom to select a particular program and specific environment for their children. But opponents contend that choice is only for those who have the resources to search the system and transport their child past the neighborhood school.
"The ones who don't have any choice at all are the most disadvantaged parents," said Gary Orfield, founder of the Civil Rights Project and professor of political science, law and education at UCLA.
As parents get more savvy in navigating the system, a school's Academic Performance Index has evolved from an obscure statistic to a must-have number that some parents use to weed out what they deem as underperforming campuses.
It's so widely used as a sorting tool for parents with means to choose from an array of schools, as well as a predictor of family income, that some educators have come to refer to it as the Affluent Parent Index.
"It's a competitive world. You must compete for families and you must compete for students and you must want to provide the best education possible," said Wright District Superintendent Karen Salvaggio. "No one out here is trying to Pac-Man the next guy to try to take them out."
But officials are starting to eye the numbers, not only to monitor racial balance but to stem the exodus of students and the state funding that goes with them.
"I think more districts are trying to market themselves," said Santa Rosa School Board member Laura Gonzalez. "I think there is a little bit of trepidation or worry that neighboring districts will start siphoning off (students)."
But for families, the decisions are far more personal that political.
Laura Larsen of Santa Rosa lived in Doyle Park Elementary School's neighborhood when her daughter was ready to enroll in kindergarten. Larsen studied test scores and enrollment patterns, and read parent comments on a school review website.
"I have always been excited for her being in a more diverse environment, for their social skills, but the school didn't have good test scores," she said. "There wasn't a whole lot of positive things to be said, about four or five years ago, about the school."
In 2007-08, the school year Larsen was set to enroll her daughter in kindergarten, Doyle Park's 271 students were 65 percent Latino and 25 percent white. Nearly half were English-language learners and 77 percent qualified for free or reduced-price lunches. In 2007, the school posted an Academic Performance Index score of 691, behind only Lincoln and Monroe elementaries.
"The test scores were a big one for me," she said. "I wanted to know that she was going to go to a place where she would have the opportunity to excel."
She never toured Doyle Park, but she did visit the former Matanzas Elementary School in the Rincon Valley School District, Proctor Terrace in Santa Rosa City Schools and Yulupa Elementary in the Bennett Valley School District.
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