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Home › Forums › Other › San Diego Unified SD: Trustee spearheads idea to divide school district › AN wrote: If voucher system

June 11, 2009 at 2:23 PM #414525
Eugene
Participant

[quote=AN]
If voucher system gets implemented the way they do in Finland, you wouldn’t be tied to SDUSD. You can send your kids to Torrey Pines, Westview, etc. [/quote]

Okay, so how would it work if 80% of parents in the county (130,000 high school students) take their vouchers to Torrey Pines and Westview (combined capacity – 6,000 students)?

I see two options.

One is that local neighborhood kids take precedence, in which case not much will change compared with today’s system. San Dieguito and Poway districts will get more “diverse” (colored) and that will be all.

The other is that all vouchers brought to a school participate in a lottery. In that case, all schools will end up having roughly the same averaged demographics: 44% hispanic, 33% white, 46% free lunches, 25% English learners. Transportation expenses will explode, schools will be forced to cut on essential services to get their kids to school. Next thing that happens is that whites and asians will be pulling out their kids from public schools and taking them to LJCD and Francis Parker.

Something similar happened in San Francisco, I think. They don’t have vouchers per se, but they have open enrollment … and the outcome is that 30% of kids in San Francisco attend private schools.

We’re not in Finland, Dorothy. Schools are not to blame for their poor scores. It’s all demographics.

[quote]
Please show me data that schools is being underutilized? If anything, it’s being overcrowded right now. So a 30% drop in students would be a good thing. 20-25 students/class room would be better than 30-35 students/class room. MMHS just recently (w/in the last 10 years) build a big 2 stories building just to accommodate the student growth. I’m not too sure about UCHS, but if you noticed, Clairemont and Linda Vista is part of this new proposed district too.[/quote]

Some north county schools may be overcrowded because more than a third of their population comes from south of the 8.

Even with busing, average class size is 19 students in Madison High, 22 students in LJ High, 24 students in Clairemont/University City/Point Loma High. Post split these numbers would go to 12, 14 and 16. MMHS and SRHS are the only schools in the “coastal” district that qualify as overcrowded.