The Robertson County School District recently made available the Out of Zone Request forms for the 2015-2016 school year.
While the forms do not differ from previous years, the Out of Zone transfer policy itself will be more closely adhered to with more of an emphasis put on information verification as the county seeks to adjust to the recent rezoning settlement with the United States Department of Justice according to County Communications Coordinator Jim Bellis.”With the Department of Justice settlement, they sat down and reviewed the demographics from the entire district and then came up with zoning that would make each zone reflect the county-wide demographic,” Bellis said. “Conceivably, what could happen that we are trying to deal with, is if a large group of kids want to move to a different school because that school offers more, then we are in effect, going to skew the demographics of that zone and the one that they are coming out of…We just have to be very careful.”Supervisor of Student Services, Donna Dorris also spoke about the tighter application verification process, saying it was no different than in previous years, but that in order to satisfy the district’s recent settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, verification of information submitted on the application will be closely examined for accuracy and guideline compliance.While those applying for out of zone transfers will require a stricter verification process, Bellis said that the reasoning for allowing transfers will not see changes.”If safety is an issue for a kid for instance, you wouldn’t make that kid go back to that school, but there really isn’t any substantial change to our reasons for allowing transfers,” Bellis said.Another change in the policy will be the county’s record keeping, as Bellis said that in recent years the county has not been able to keep a centrally located file of transfer applications, but will now be able to do so.The county will also be able to track which reasons for transferring are most often used by applicants.”Really I’m not even sure if we would have much of a record of those reasons unless we went around to each school and they happened to keep those records,” Bellis said. “With this exercise though, we would eventually be able to have all those records at a district level and might then be able to quantify that.”The new forms, which are now available online, must be filled out and turned in at Central Office at 2121 Woodland Street in Springfield by June 30, with all notifications of approval being sent to parents and guardians between July 10 and Aug. 1, 2015.