A wealthy enclave of Miami-Dade County is considering buying space for its residents in a local public school.
Setting aside whether this is fair to other families hoping to enroll their children in Henry S. West Laboratory School, this story in the Miami Herald should lend further credence to idea that parents – including those who can afford to send their children to private schools – want more options from the public school system.
Students in Coral Gables are five times more likely than the average Florida to attend private school, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. And families there are more likely to be able to afford it without the help of a private school choice program. The median household income is roughly twice the average for Miami-Dade County as a whole.
Yet the Herald reports that families in the city are lining up for slots in the popular magnet school, which is located within the city’s limits, but is oversubscribed due to high demand from all over the county. The city government is looking for ways to accommodate their desires to enroll their children.
“In my neighborhood, everyone goes to private,” said Dave Kelly, a Coral Gables resident. “It’s not because they don’t want to go to public schools. They just can’t get in.”
To give residents a better shot at landing a seat, Coral Gables officials on Friday discussed paying the school district a one-time fee of $23,000 per student to establish a separate lottery program just for residents who want their children to attend West Lab. As it stands now, the proposal is to buy between 22 and 44 seats per grade level.
Recent research indicates low-income families may be more likely to participate in Florida’s tax credit scholarship program if they have less access to charter schools or district-run school choice programs.
The Herald story suggests similar dynamics may be at work in Coral Gables, due to a lack of space in the magnet school close to home.
School Board member Raquel Regalado, who represents the city, said about 16 percent of students currently at West Lab are Coral Gables residents. About half of the more than 500 people on a waiting list for the school are city residents, she said.
“We have to demystify the belief that Coral Gables residents do not go to public schools because they don’t want to,” Regalado said. “The fact that it’s an affluent community does not mean they should not be offered options.”
It’s not that there’s a lack of options in the Miami-Dade school system as a whole. The Herald writes that the majority of students in the district attend options beyond their zoned school. A report by the state Department of Education, which may have counted students differently, found about a third of the county’s students participate in some form of school choice – one of the highest rates in the state.
But parents in Coral Gables are seeking options that work for their kids, and that are close to where they live.
In a city where the majority of parents have the means to choose schools outside the school district, local officials are looking for ways for the district to better accommodate them. What might happen if every parent had that ability? Not every community can afford to buy space in the schools that best meets its children’s needs.
