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Most school requests granted for 2009-10 in Mooresville
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Published: May 20, 2009
With approximately 175 requests in hand from families seeking the new "school choice" option, Mooresville Graded School District officials say those figures were "almost on target" for what was expected.
The decision to offer families this option, said MGSD spokesperson Dreisa Sherrill in March, was based on convenience factors -- such as a parent who may pass a particular school on his or her drive to work that is not the school their child has been selected to attend -- as well as changes due to the redistricting process and new attendance lines throughout the MGSD.
Both South and Park View elementaries received and approved the largest number of requests, approximately 39 and 67, respectively, with current second graders primarily choosing to remain at their current school despite being selected, due to attendance boundaries, to attend another elementary.
"I believe that we kind of expected the larger number of requests to come from present second graders who wanted to complete their elementary school years at the elementary school that they're presently attending," said Director of Operations Stephen Mauney.
The school choice option was provided to all families of students attending those elementaries and Rocky River Elementary in the 2009-10 school year as well as either of the district's intermediate schools.
Twenty-nine requests were approved for students wanting to attend Mooresville Intermediate with 19 for East Mooresville Intermediate. Mauney said nearly 90 percent of these requests were students who currently attend one intermediate, but fell into the other school's new attendance lines.
Rocky River, the district's newest school, received the least amount of requests at approximately 16.
These figures were calculated April 3, the MGSD's deadline for school choice request forms, and were presented by Mauney at the board of education's May meeting last week. Minor adjustments, he noted, have been made since the initial estimates.
"Any choice that was presented prior to the deadline was honored," he said, adding that fewer than 10 requests were denied by the district because they were submitted after April 3.
"We created the deadline because we needed to make staff assignments and we have to have a cut off date somewhere or else we're going to be continuously changing staff members from one school to another," he said. Those assignments, he noted, were made late last week.
"I think that the school choice option was very positive," added Mauney. "From input that we've received from the parent advisory committee, we found that parents appreciated the opportunity for school choice and there's a value in parents knowing that their child is attending a school that they chose to attend.
"I think it worked very well and would expect, from every indication that we have, that we would have school choice as long as we can."
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