A Matter Of Choice The Report Card Is Mixed On The Success Of Students Being Able To Choose The Schools They Attend

School choice is a 10-year-old experiment that, at least in the Spokane Valley, has failed in one important way.

Yet in other, perhaps unanticipated ways, school choice has succeeded.

In 1990, state lawmakers gave parents and students a choice of schools to attend. They hoped to create competition. The finest schools would prosper; the mediocre ones would lose students. At least, so proposed then-Gov. Booth Gardner.

Educators point out that students do use choice to get to programs their home schools don’t offer. But they agree that the spirit of competition among schools hasn’t developed.

“Do I have ennobling conversations with parents about excellence in academics? Not very often,” said West Valley High School Principal Cleve Penberthy.

The unintended consequences of school choice are valuable, though.

School choice helps high school students to anchor themselves in a school they know and trust, when divorce or dad’s new job across town disrupts their home life.

School choice has created a way for siblings to follow family tradition and for teenagers to make a fresh start, away from bad influences or adolescent turmoil.

Also, despite efforts to the contrary, school choice has created a way for athletes to move to more promising teams or more attractive coaches.

A trio of students now at East Valley High School illustrate some of the dynamics of school choice:

LaTroya Spencer is a senior whose family moved to Spokane from Arkansas in the middle of her freshman year. She had a good spring at East Valley, only to have her family move into the West Valley School District. The prospect of moving to another new school as a sophomore was too much.

“I said `Mama, I can’t do this,”’ Spencer said. She chose to attend East Valley, and, earning a 3.6 gpa, she has thrived as a Knight ever since. This year, her younger brother is a freshman at West Valley High School.

“He can walk to school, while I have to drive for 20 minutes,” LaTroya says. “My room is all green and white; his is all orange and black.”

Dennis Ludiker is a sophomore at East Valley High. A resdient of the West Valley School District, he decided to attend East Valley, largely for the school’s orchestra program and the Strolling Strings, a well-known performing group. Dennis has played fiddle most of his life. He remembers being picked on as a sixth-grader, when friends thought his musical interest was “weird.”

At East Valley, where nearly 70 kids are choice students, Ludiker has found none of that.

“This school has a wide variety of kids. Even some of the most popular kids are friends with people you wouldn’t believe,” Dennis says.

Elly Smith, a senior, also values the open-mindedness she finds among East Valley students. She came to East Valley from the Central Valley School District as a freshman. Elly’s home school would be University High School.

Her father, Mike Smith, teaches at East Valley High, but Elly says that wasn’t a big reason she came.

“I wanted a fresh start. I went to Bowdish (Junior High School) but I didn’t fit in,” Elly says. She realizes now, she says, that the cliques she encountered in seventh- and eighthgrade were more due to that particular age group than the school she attended. Still, the move to East Valley has been a good one.

Also, Elly plays varsity volleyball and tennis for East Valley and her father coaches both sports there.

At high schools across the Valley, choice students are finding programs and teachers and friends that they like.

Becca Cortez is a senior at West Valley High. She enrolled there as a freshman, rather than going to U-Hi.

“I wanted to stick with a small school environment,” says Becca, who grew up in Yakima, expecting to go to a smaller high school there. It was important to her to find a school where she would make lots of friends. Her plans has worked. Through band and other programs at West Valley, she has friends of all ages.

West Valley High has about 800 students; U-Hi has roughly 1,000 kids.

Other students use school choice for all sorts of reasons.

A few students have enrolled at East Valley to avoid Central Valley’s four-period day. A sprinkling of students change schools for a certain counselor, or the drama program, or choir, or teaching style. Because each Spokane Valley district requires a different number of credits for graduation, students who are short on credits occasionally change schools so they can graduate on time.

Students move into Freeman High School, because at 300 students, it’s small and personal. They move out of Freeman to get programs that aren’t available in such a small school.

Sophomore Michelle Fleming moved to CV High from U-Hi because her best friend was doing it, too.

“But the day before school, she changed her mind,” Michelle said. This gutsy kid stuck to her plan, though. Michelle and other choice students advise students who are thinking about choice to carefully check out the advantages.

“Really be sure, before you do it,” Michelle says.

It is difficult to learn exactly how many high school students are using the choice law. Schools request paperwork, but not every student fills out the choice paperwork after their first year as a choice student.

Penberthy, the principal at West Valley, suggests that even more families would take advantage of open enrollment choices if there were a high school that offered a significantly stronger academic program.

“Right now, you have comprehensive high school A and comprehensive high school B,” he says.

“If I created a 400-student ninth- to 12th-grade magnet school for math and science, I think you could have a lot of interest,” he says.

SCHOOL CHOICE By the numbers School choice (or open enrollment) allows a student to register in any school that has space for an extra body. Here are the numbers of students who moved either in or out of Spokane Valley high schools this fall: Central Valley High School: 41 students in; 29 out. University High School: 38 students in; 32 out. East Valley High School: 14 students in; 18 out. West Valley High School: 36 students in; 27 out. Freeman High School: 7 students in; 13 out.