brian, let’s be realistic here. The teacher’s unions don’t want to rock the boat on this issue, either. After all, a portion of each district’s schools are situated in older areas, where the vast majority of homeowners have grown children. If the district couldn’t move around students from one attendance area to another and/or fill slots in these under-capacity schools with whatever warm bodies applied for them with a “guardianship affidavit,” then that school likely wouldn’t have enough students for the district to be able to afford to keep it open. This would trickle down to possible layoffs and forced early retirements of the teachers and their unions don’t want that.
In other states (especially states which have very cold winters where schools have to run heat just to keep their plumbing from freezing), schools in older neighborhoods DO end up getting closed and the few students residing in them are bussed elsewhere to school. But I’ve never seen this happen in SD. At one time, Chula Vista High School had less than 400 students living within its attendance boundaries and the SUHSD was considering closing it. But alas, they found a way to keep it open by expanding its vocal music dept and accepting apps for out-of-area students who wanted to audition for a spot in one of their show choirs. It now has a whopping ~2700 students!
