Out-of-district transfers: the good and the bad




It may not be a trend, but it’s a troubling series of events, to be sure.

Last week The Acorn reported that a player was kicked off the Agoura High School football team following an alleged display of obscene behavior during an Oct. 17 bus ride to a game in Los Angeles. In addition, a second player and three coaches were suspended for the incident, which was investigated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department but did not result in charges being pressed.

The player who was kicked off the team is a senior from outside the school district and his transfer is in the process of being revoked.

Oak Park— which has the highest percentage of out-of-district transfers in the area—was the scene of a particularly unsettling incident earlier this year in which a rash of bullying tweets referencing Hitler’s birthday led to the expulsion of two students.

The incident began with a series of anti- Semitic tweets. Other students responded with an orgy of bigoted tweets targeting Asians, blacks and gays.

One of the expelled students was a transfer from Simi Valley. The other had come to Oak Park from Thousand Oaks.

The April incident in Oak Park and the one last week at Agoura High have sullied the image of the student transfer, yet the opendoor policy continues..

It’s mostly a dollars-and-cents issue.

Oak Park—and other high schools in the region—felt crunched by the recession and declining enrollment, so they opened their doors to just about any student who could keep the classroom filled and the revenue coming in. Oak Park today would be closing campuses left and right had it not been able to recruit about 40 percent of its student body from Los Angeles, Simi Valley and Conejo Unified school districts.

The transfer population at Las Virgenes Unified is under 20 percent.

Overall enrollment in LVUSD remains well below its peak 10 years ago. So in one respect you could say that it’s no big deal if they add back a few out-of-district bodies.

For Oak Park, the out-of-district transfer is truly a matter of survival.

There’s no question that a bigger student population allows school districts to offer more comprehensive programming. Students reap the benefits, classroom doors stay open and teachers remain employed.

But here’s the problem. The traffic on Kanan Road in the morning is horrendous because of the influx of out-of-district cars. Las Virgenes, to its credit, tries to alleviate the traffic problem by staggering the start times of its K-12 schools. Oak Park does not.

The Kanan traffic nightmare is something that affects all residents, not just the families of kids in school. And therein lies the biggest problem. Student transfers are OK, but only to an extent.

Going forward, we hope our school leaders will be more reasonable and put a tighter cap on the number of student transfers accepted.



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