EDUCATION
Enroll me away Fewer yellow buses taking students out of MUSD
BY JEFF CHEW
S
2009. For her, KSD appealed because it’s a Spanish language-dominated district, unlike Maricopa. “My husband is from Mexico and I speak Spanish fluently, but we somehow didn’t teach our kids any Spanish,” Anguiano said. “We heard about a school in the Kyrene School District that has the dual language program, and we knew we wanted that for our kids, and we have sent all four of our kids there.” Anguiano said after elementary school, she and her husband brought their kids back to MUSD to be closer to home. “I’m not super impressed with the middle school or high school here, but it’s OK,” she said. Block busser It is Maricopa parents such as Fulton and Anguiano who for various reasons bus their kids outside MUSD. Since the early 1990s, Arizona’s open
enrollment law has allowed students to attend public schools outside the districts in which they live. That’s not the case in more than half of states, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Both KSD and TUHSD not only enroll children from MUSD but send buses to the city to transport kids to them. Kyrene and Tempe school districts together bus 316 students out of MUSD, according to the latest count. In 2008, there were considerably more students being bused out of MUSD – 922. KSD spokesperson Erin Helm said her district enrolls about 300 students living inside MUSD. Five buses transport an estimated 170 of those Maricopa students to four Kyrene schools. The rest get their own rides. “There has been a decrease over time,” Helm said. “Kyrene transports fewer Maricopa children today than in the past.”
ENITA RESIDENT STEPHANIE Fulton is just fine with her daughter taking a school bus 45 minutes up to Tempe Union High
School District to get an education. Fulton’s daughter, an 11th grader, left Maricopa Unified School District five years ago after she matriculated from Butterfield Elementary School. She continued her middle school education at Kyrene School District before graduating to attend high school at Mountain Pointe High School. “The reason we sent her to Kyrene was because she wasn’t feeling challenged enough,” Fulton said. “Now, high school seems to be going great for her.” Fulton said the experience of busing her student more than 20 miles each way has been “entirely positive” with “buses on time” in traffic or not. Rancho El Dorado resident Bethany Anguiano moved her family to Maricopa in
InMaricopa.com | April 2024
April 2024 | InMaricopa.com
42
43
Powered by FlippingBook