APS to audit enrollment at North Star

Albuquerque Public Schools is still considering how best to alleviate overcrowding at North Star Elementary, which is about 80 students over capacity and has been overcrowded nearly every year since it opened in 2006. The school has 743 students in a site built for 663.

Possible solutions include requiring families to provide more proof of residence when they register and shifting the school’s attendance boundaries.

District officials held a community meeting in September at the Northeast Heights elementary, where parents were adamant that the district should crack down on families pretending to live within the school’s attendance boundaries in order to send their children there.

North Star, north of Alameda on Ventura NE, is one of the most affluent schools in Albuquerque and boasts high standardized test scores.

APS officials agreed to audit enrollment at the school and said at a Tuesday night board policy committee meeting that the audit will be presented soon.

APS Superintendent Winston Brooks gave some clues as to what it will say.

“I have briefly looked at the preliminary audit. I think there are some, this is probably not a politically correct term, folks that are sending their kids to North Star illegally; they’ve not been totally honest,” Brooks said. “But it’s not going to be enough to make up the gap of the 80 students you’re talking about.”

A committee of North Star parents has been working to draft a policy that would require parents districtwide to show proof of residency when they register for school. While this is done at many schools, the requirement has never been spelled out in a policy.

The committee has also drafted a rule that would say that APS can require additional proof of residency from families who are registering at an overcrowded school, or in other circumstances identified by the administration. The school board discussed these proposals Tuesday night, but did not vote on them. The proposals are based on policies the committee examined in Boston, Baltimore and Atlanta.

Mike Mertz, a North Star parent and chair of the committee that drafted the proposals, said parents would like to see a boundary change as a last resort.

“We want to explore all our options before we resort to a boundary change,” Mertz said. He said that, in addition to the policy proposals, the committee also talked about a public awareness campaign to inform parents about Double Eagle Elementary. Double Eagle is just a few miles from North Star, has almost identical test scores and is under-capacity.

Brooks also emphasized that North Star isn’t the only school dealing with crowding this year. Rudolfo Anaya Elementary, near Unser and Blake SW, has even more severe overcrowding. However, because that school has open land nearby, the district has brought in 20 portables to alleviate the problem.

“This is not a North Star policy; this will be policy for the whole district,” Brooks said.
— This article appeared on page C1 of the Albuquerque Journal