

McDonogh 35 football player Kendrick Grant tells the Orleans Parish School Board about his opposition to the OneApp centralized enrollment system, June 18, 2013. (Danielle Dreilinger, | The Times-Picayune)


If spots open up, school administrators will regain the power taken away from them by OneApp: to complete a separate, decentralized enrollment for their own schools, selecting students themselves.

Recovery School District and Orleans Parish School Board staff will compile a list of non-responding families by June 24 and reach out to them, including running a series of radio ads.

However, any new charter schools that OPSB authorizes will still have to join OneApp right away. A motion to suspend that policy requiried a two-thirds vote and failed 4-3, with Ira Thomas, Leslie Ellison, Cynthia Cade and Nolan Marshall II in favor.

Now in its second year, the Recovery School District-run OneApp program aims to simplify the application process and make enrollment decisions anonymous and transparent. Families use a single application. Where demand exceeds supply, a computer makes the assignments, prioritizing geography for elementary schools and siblings of current students. Two of three application rounds are complete.

The Orleans Parish School Board's participation in OneApp has always been shaky. Its direct-run schools objected to the previous board's decision to add them for the 2013-14 academic year, and charter schools won a fight to stay out of the program until their contracts come up for renewal -- which in some cases isn't until 2021.

And the problems that administrators, parents and students have encountered in OneApp only strengthened their opposition. They talked about the issues Tuesday and at the previous week's committee meetings.

They were shaken by the effects of a computer making random assignments, especially because intense popularity -- and high retention -- meant most applicants didn't get in to the school of their choice. Nearly 1,500 students applied to McMain, more than 1,400 to Baby Ben and 850 to McDonogh 35.

When a computer picks your students, you may not end up with the football team you're used to, or enough trumpeters in the band. If student athletes end up attending schools that don't offer their sports -- post-Katrina, not all schools offer all programs -- they risk losing out on scholarships. 

Marshall said it was important to make sure those matches were made.

The audience at Tuesday's School Board meeting included about 50 McDonogh 35 football players clad in their maroon and gold uniforms and 25 McMain football players in white and gold, a visual reminder of the schools' traditions.

Kendrick Grant, Roneagle #64, criticized the fact that OneApp doesn't require parents to even visit the schools. "They have no insight on what the school is capable of doing to their children," he said. As for the students who applied through OneApp, "We don't know if they'll be able to benefit our school or if they'll lower our standards."

One looked for George Orwell at times in the discussion. Assigned school spots were vacant because administrators didn't know if children would show up -- i.e., full seats were empty. OneApp wasn't fair because it didn't include all the city's schools, so the School Board should take its schools out. Administrators of open-admission public schools should be able to choose who attends their schools.

The debate reopened the question in the local education community of what exactly constitutes "open" enrollment. The only entrance stricture listed in OneApp for these five schools is priority at the high schools for students in the elementaries.

If a school doesn't require children to pass an entry exam but does require parents to attend orientations or return registration packets, is that open enrollment? What if those policies risk cutting out children whose parents are troubled, overworked or absent, the children who may be the most at-risk and farthest behind?

"We don't need to be a selective-admissions school to be successful," said Charlotte Matthew, principal of Ben Franklin Elementary. But she said she does need to be able to register students for classes before the school year starts.

Gabriela Fighetti, the Recovery School District's executive director of enrollment, acknowledged in an interview that non-responsive families and students signing up but not showing up were real problems, but she said those problems existed before OneApp.

It's impossible to assess OneApp's impact because in the decentralized enrollment system schools kept their own records, she said.

What OneApp did was standardize the process and make "a framework of policies so families weren't just dropped based on a myriad of rules that were different at every school," Fighetti said.

She also said that the Orleans Parish School Board approved a policy via its representative on a OneApp task force saying there would be no deadlines for families to complete registration or respond in any way to their school assignment.

In the end, the decision came down to a difference in philosophy.

"We actually do not believe that administrators should be allowed to select children," said Dana Peterson, deputy superintendent for the Recovery School District. Whether a student plays football or trumpet, whether a parent shows up at an orientation, "all kids deserve the same opportunity to get into schools that they desire," he said.

But the majority opinion of the room was clear: Peterson was booed down. And the opinion of the School Board was clear as well.

Board member Woody Koppel said the experience showed that Orleans Parish schools were so popular they needed the ability to expand, a process severely hampered now by the fact that the Recovery School District controls nearly all the city's school buildings.

The third round of OneApp opens June 24 and closes July 10 -- and will, it seems, not include any Orleans Parish School Board schools. The board will continue the OneApp discussion in July.