Understanding Transiency and How it Affects School Performance

If you attended Wednesday night's South County Elementary School Attendance Zone Redistricting forum at you didn't hear much from the administrators but lots from citizens. Recently in more intimate settings the word “transiency” has been tossed around by Cobb County School Board (CCSB) and City officials as the primary challenge in improving school ratings. In discussions with citizens I’ve found that this concept is not well understood.

Transiency is the condition where a person (transient) or family only lives or works in one place for a short time. The challenge for the school that has lots of students where this condition exists includes:

• Poor Attendance Rates
• High Drop Out Rates
• Lack of Parent Involvement & School Contribution
• Lack of Community Cohesiveness (making it difficult to influence a culture for education).
• Lost of Consistency in Educational Impact (ex. learning curve from having familiar environment, teachers, methods and tools)
• Low Predictability in School Budget Planning

Most of the above factors affect total school performance on achieving AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) standards. While apartments tend to be where “transient” living occurs, there are also other reasons it may occur. They include the following profiles:

The Home Shopper: A resident has moved temporarily into an apartment while shopping for a permanent home. These residents tend to stay in the apartment for at least a full school year. They also tend to have chosen an apartment complex in a school district in which they intend to purchase their permanent home. Their children are likely to stay in the school they are already attending.

The Upstart Professional: New apartment residents are often single young professionals. They will eventually purchase a single family home. Since at the start of their careers they tend not to have school-aged children, they have little effect on transiency.

The Real Issue: A 2011 Pew Hispanic Center Report states that in 2010 Georgia was home to as many as 425,000 undocumented immigrants. That’s more than Arizona prior to their controversial laws being enacted. When Georgia school board officials discuss transiency they are really referring to immigrant apartment dwellers who choose apartments almost entirely based upon price and ease of disposal. Apartment management companies aggressively use sales strategies that offer “free rent” for anywhere from 1-3 months for new residents. For a family with low income, leaving your current apartment every six months could mean saving sometimes $3,600 a year at a rent of $600 per month. Whether they move once for a one-month free offer, or more often, that’s great incentive for transiency. Adding to reasons for transiency in this group are short-term trade and labor jobs, and the fear of being found and deported if one remains in one place too long.

Solutions to the above problem most often relate to decreasing the number of apartments in a City or school district. This is a difficult objective to achieve. Using the as an example, purchasing and repurposing and apartment complexes reduces transiency for schools in that area. While those purchases demonstrated good civic leadership with many benefits, that is not a viable long-term strategy. A city would have to have unlimited reserves or a large appetite for debt to continue such a practice. (My recollection of days playing low tech Monopoly, or high tech city planning games like Sim City also suggested that the proper balance of types of buildings and stable revenue streams is also crucial. The city is right to also be concerned about highly dispersed poor infrastructure.)

There are examples in Georgia of schools with high percentages of immigrants with high marks for school success. Gainesville City Schools have had as much as 63 percent of its student enrollment from Latino immigrants. Yet, its high school was selected as a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. That fact suggests that the commitment to education and aptitude of Latino families is not the issue. The difference between Gainesville and Metro Atlanta is that we’ve got a competitive apartment market, while housing choices in Gainesville are not as plentiful. Metro Atlanta presents the perfect storm for transiency. Fast start and stop construction, retail and industrial jobs, a housing surplus from overbuilding by developers during the good years, and now a poor economy worsening the vacancies. Adding to the problem in Smyrna was an apartment moratorium that essentially de-motivated complex owners to invest in maintaining quality in facilities.

My volunteer experience working with the Hispanic parents I’ve encountered is that they have deep desire to see their children achieve in America. But they also struggle with knowing enough English to interpret homework assignments. Interpreters are sorely needed in both classes and PTA meetings. Even when present, regional dialects and class difference still make it difficult to communicate. I suspect that over the coming years, Cobb County will come to grips with the reality of the situation. The ability to influence immigration is a federal issue. The ability to influence learning is a local one. It is understandably easy to get stuck on the complexity of immigration and lose focus on what we can do to teach the children well now that they are in our schools. Argyle Elementary School’s PTA has decided to host some of its meetings in host family apartment complexes such as off of Cobb Parkway. Over the next few months I will be looking for “best practices” documented not immigration status, but schools, cities and districts that effectively assimilate and educate student populations presenting the challenge of transiency and language barriers. I hope others will do the same and share them here on Patch or wherever we can all learn together.

P.S.
Here's an interesting tidbit that you didn't get at the Redistricting Meetings. Smyrna schools to the right of Cobb 41 along Herodian Way are zoned for Brumby, which is located in Marietta.