Transfers

Several comments have been made about the number of approved transfers to Mills, and we'd like to set the record straight concerning them. Our school has been frozen to transfers for a number of years, meaning that only priority transfers will be approved. When a transfer request is sent to Student Services, it is automatically denied, and must be reviewed and approved by the Associate Superintendent, Ariel Cloud. As a courtesy, she typically verifies these with Mrs. Butler.

Any school in the district that is frozen to transfers will never have zero transfers. There are policies adopted by AISD that will prevent that from ever being the case. Mills currently has eleven majority-to-minority transfers, which are required by district policy. The AISD website states, "Students may transfer from a school where the student's ethnic group is over 50 percent of the school's population to a school where the student's ethnic group is under 50 percent of the school's population. The purpose of the majority-to-minority transfer is to complement the District's student assignments and promote diversity throughout the District."

Another policy of the district is to allow children of teachers and staff to attend the school where their parent works. There are many reasons for this, and they all benefit the school. When a teacher shows confidence in a school by having their own children attend, you can count on the quality of students education to be heightened. We currently have sixteen children of teachers and two children of staff members attending Mills.

Yet another group of students who have traditionally been granted transfers district-wide are students who are in their final year of attendance at a campus, in our case 5th grade. When a new school opens, 5th graders are given the option to stay if they choose to finish their education at the school they've been attending. Likewise, they are given the option to stay if their family moves and they are entering 5th grade. This was the case a few years ago with students who were re-zoned to Clayton Elementary but chose to stay at Mills.

Students who are grandfathered also tend to have siblings, and those siblings are also granted priority transfers. It would not be workable for parents to have children at two different schools that kept the same hours. Some of Mills continuing transfers are the siblings of those 5th graders who chose to stay at Mills over Clayton, and they are now finishing up at Mills.

Finally, there are some students who have special needs who it would be harmful to move. We do want to keep the focus on what is best for students, and some students need to stay in a stable environment that they are familiar with and with staff who have been supporting them.

While we don't want to encourage any new transfers, we stand by the District's position in granting these limited, priority transfers. Eliminating all transfers would never be an option, and it would not solve our overcrowding problem.