ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997 TAG: 9704110020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
If Roanoke County continues to boost fees for nonresident students, it will do significant damage to the principle of public-school choice in the region.
IF YOU live outside Roanoke and there's space available in city schools, you can send your children to them at no extra charge. The parents of roughly 125 kids do so.
If you live outside Roanoke County and have been sending your children to county schools, you've been paying a nominal annual fee of $100 per student. The parents of about 600 kids have been doing so.
But this year, if your child were a newly enrolled nonresident student in Roanoke County, the fee went up to $500. And next year, under some proposals, it could rise to as much as $3,200, the local share of the county's per-student school costs, for all nonresident students.
From the county's perspective, this may make sense. But for the region as a whole, it's a giant step backward from the principle of public-school choice.
For the past decade, the valley's school systems have operated under an informal agreement of accepting other jurisdictions' students for little or no charge. Parents of nonresident students don't pay property taxes to the locality in which their children go to school. But the space-available provision kept nonresident students from posing a financial hardship - at first, anyway - on school systems that accept them. The classroom is there already, the teacher already hired. Moreover, the state's share of education costs (for Roanoke County this year, about $2,600 per student) follows children to the district where they attend school, not where they live.
The county's difficulty is that grade schools with space available feed into junior-high and middle schools where space is at a premium. But for financial (the state money) and educational reasons, the schools have been reluctant to boot out longtime nonresident students.
It's easy to sympathize with those in the county calling for higher nonresident tuition, particularly when you keep in mind that the largest number of nonresident students come not from the city but from low-tax Bedford and Franklin counties. Still, before going the high-tuition route, other possible solutions should be considered.
Could, for example, the space-available provision be enforced more stringently? While this would reduce school choice in the valley, it would probably reduce it by less than exorbitant nonresident fees.
A more enduring solution would be development of a comprehensive regional strategy, perhaps including cost-sharing arrangements, for accommodating nonresident students. If not all school divisions would be interested, at least some might be - provided they value public-school choice for the parents and children in their districts.
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