Could A Simplified Enrollment System be the Answer to Serving Families Better in EBR?
Baton Rouge Alliance for Students Action encourages the school board to broaden access to top-performing schools
Baton Rouge, LA – Today, the Baton Rouge Alliance for Students Action released a publication titled “A Single, Simplified Enrollment System for All Public Schools,” making the case for all public school types – magnet, traditional, and charter – to be available to families via a single, simplified enrollment system. The paper explores the barriers families face to accessing the city’s high-performing and most-improving public schools, provides a history of why EBR’s top public schools serve middle- and upper-income families at significantly higher rates than they serve economically disadvantaged students, leaving the most at-risk children at the greatest risk of being underserved. It also discusses why the easiest schools to navigate are the lowest-performing, and why the ones with the most complicated processes are skewed towards families with means.
“The quality of a child’s schooling varies widely depending on which part of town they are from, which is not how a public school system should function, said Adonica Pelichet Duggan, CEO of Baton Rouge Alliance for Students Action. “The School Board has the power and authority to solve this issue in a way that’s responsive to the community’s desires. A single enrollment system would offer access to all public schools in one place, and the current, complicated enrollment processes and timelines can be streamlined into something simple and easy to use by all families.”