The Transfer Student issue effects the local and state government budgets, as much as the local school boards education policy. The purpose of this letter is to suggest that the county commissioners and state officials become involved in the issue involving children attending schools other than the one based on their home address i.e. Transfer Students.  The reason is because school enrollment figures from individual schools drive decisions at both the local and state government levels.  Things such as:   new school construction and county new home growth laws.  Although the funding concepts are not new, what most people do not know is that the data relied upon by decision makers in the county and state government is never adjusted by CCPS for children attending other schools on transfers.  The total enrollments are all our county and state officials are being presented in each and every report.
 
To understand the problem, it is important to understand how CCPS views their policies and procedures.  The board of education writes a policy and votes on it.  The board of education then delegates the administration of the policy to the superintendent.  The superintendent writes the accompanying procedures, which is not reviewed by or voted on by the board of education.   There is no mechanism to ensure the procedures achieve the intended guidance in the policy set forth by the board of education (and this is not an accident because it is spelled out this way in the procedures for policy development).  The policy versus procedures separation is a primary problem with topics such as the transfer students.  The transfer situation and landscape drives up costs for school officials but also the tax payer.  However, the separation of policy from procedures allows for maximum flexibility for school officials for their day to day operations.  The transfer policy, for example, does not have a provision for county school bus service to/from out of boundary daycare providers.  It is the superintendent’s procedure that authorizes the daycare transportation service. Also, the transfer policy permits transfers in limited circumstances, but does not specify the criteria for a transfer and/or the criteria for daycares to be aligned to more than one school.  It is the superintendent (in his procedure) that determines the school assignments for the daycare owner’s customers.  Yet by law, moving children’s attendance areas is the responsibility of the board of education as described in their policy, but contradicted in the superintendent’s procedures. There is no requirement in either the transfer policy or transfer procedure on how to report the transfer student numbers to the county or state governments, which as I will explain, has caused the county tax payers millions of dollars.  
 
The transfer student policy and procedure has serious implications for the county’s Smart Growth Laws and State School construction funding and brings with it requirements for new school construction funds that all of us should be concerned with.  The Smart Growth Laws of Calvert County mandate that schools have the space/capacity to accept additional students from proposed new homes construction.  Thus, builders can’t build new homes unless there is space in the school that the proposed new homes will be geographically assigned to.  The Calvert County Adequate Public Facilities (APF) document built by county planners, guides this determination processes and it is based on student enrollment data provided by Calvert County Public Schools.  The problem is that the enrollment data provided by CCPS is not adjusted for transfer students who are attending schools other than their board of education assigned schools (nor does it account for students using