Last summer, the Madison Central School District expressed its petty jealousy by invoking a new state law to order neighboring Rutland School District to limit its bus service for open-enrolled students to one bus stop in Madison. Rutland sought a compromise between Madison Central's desires and student safety (the two are not, alas, identical) and established three sites to pick up the many Madison students who prefer to attend Rutland.
The state Department of Education then threatened to take away Rutland's accreditation for this civil disobedience against a really bad law. Somewhat chastened, Rutland appears not to have given up the fight completely. At its Monday meeting, the Rutland school board reduced its Madison bus stops to two.
This legal fracas may not be affecting Rutland's open enrollment numbers. Monday's school board meeting also included discussion of buying a larger bus.
The 2012 Legislature convenes in less than two months. Perhaps Rutland is keeping this unjust situation on the burner long enough to remind our legislators to take some action. Rep. Stricherz, Rep. Fargen, you both voted against the bad legislation that makes Madison think it can tell Rutland where to drive. Now's the perfect time to write up a repeal. Make a stand for student safety, not to mention restraint of absurdly unconstitutional school board authority over free travel on public roads.
The law itself says nothing about enforcement, so could the state actually take away accreditation for this reason? Wonder how and why the DofE came to that position.
Bottom line--it's a bad law. Let's get rid of it. Madison School board needs to grab onto the issue, retract it's stubborn position and let Rutland run it's own business. Open enrollment should not be about putting students in unsafe situations or some kind of defacto custody battle. OE students and families are not second class citizens and should not be treated as such by the MCSD.
I guess I can see both sides of this issue, but I don't understand Rutland's decision to change to two bus stops. It seems like they should either either keep the three to serve their students the best they can, or they should reduce it to one to comply with the law. Not sure what they get out of splitting the baby this way.
I wonder if these are the teeth, John. State Rule 24:43:02:01 says that if you lose accreditation, you lose state funding. Rule 24:43:02:02 says that the accreditation system exists to ensure that schools "comply with state law."
Brett: could Rutland be trying to buy time for Madison to decide to compromise? Maybe by taking this seemingly odd half-action, Rutland keeps the state from taking final action on accreditation for another couple months?