Survey Asks Why Students Leave Columbia Heights District

When a third of the children in the Columbia Heights School District attend school elsewhere, they take $11 million in state funding with them.

That's one of the hard facts behind a district survey of parents in the district seeking to discover why kids don't stay in district schools, the Star Tribune reported:

About 660 children open enroll into the district, mostly from Minneapolis. But that still leaves the district a net loser in the open-enrollment race.

The 1,100 students leaving Columbia Height Schools fan out to neighboring districts, with Fridley, St. Anthony-New Brighton and Mounds View absorbing the most.

One Columbia Heights parent told the newspaper those patterns influenced his family's choice:

He worried that with the influx of Minneapolis students, the district was starting to skew more low-income. He said families in the middle get left behind.

Read the full Star Tribune article.

In January, a University of Minnesota study identified District 13 as one of the Twin Cities districts losing the most students in the open-enrollment process.

The Columbia Heights School Board meets Tuesday night at 7 p.m. (click on PDF for agenda or visit the district website).