Aside from that, as an afterthought, what does the Senate think of re-purposing the bill to allow parents to have their children attend public schools of their choices provided that it is the parent - not school district(s) involved - who are left to be wholly responsible for transporting their child or children? This would circumvent the cost of taking buses out of their usual ways, would it not? Does anybody else have ideas to bounce off of the President now that he has become firmly embedded in the fabric that is this discussion?
Actually I would much prefer this to having the school help responsible for busing.
In Ohio, we have an open-enrollment law that allows schools to admit students from neighboring districts, if the school chooses to take part, and the funding for that student is transferred to the district the student attends. But the school provides no transportation and the parents are responsible for that.
This bill is designed to be restricted to a single district, which means many, probably most, districts in the country will be completely unaffected because they only have one high school. The idea is more similar to the system in Arizona where parents can choose which school in the district to send their kids to. The school my sister taught at there was rated the best in the district (a pretty poor, heavily minority district much like her school) in test score improvements one year, so the next year they had a huge surge in enrollment. In some ways it was a good thing to have since parents had the option of sending their children to the best public school in the area, but it also caused overcrowding issues because the school, despite having the power to reject students, would reject no one.
