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As the Berkeley school board considers ways to reduce an estimated $5 million budget shortfall next year, including possibly increasing class sizes slightly for some grades, some are wondering if the district can still afford to take hundreds of students each year from outside the city. 

“The impact on the district hasn’t been quantified,” said board Director John Selawsky Wednesday. “We can tell how many kids are coming in, but nobody has really broken that down to determine what it does to class size.” 

In the current school year, 673 of the district’s more-than 9,000 students live outside Berkeley, according to district records. Nearly 90 percent of them hail from Oakland or the West Contra Costa County School District. 

“People perceive Berkeley public schools as being markedly better than some of our neighboring districts primarily because of the (level of financial support for Berkeley schools),” Selawsky explained. 

But what Selawsky and others want to know is: are the out-of-town students putting undo strain on the district’s finances? 

“This has always been an issue, particularly for property owners (who pay taxes),” said Berkeley PTA Council President Mark Coplan. “We need to have information at our finger tips to tell us what effect this has.” 

Of course, as is often the case, this is easier said than done. 

At the heart of the question, said Fred Dunn-Ruiz, manager of student services for the school district, is the issue of whether the so-called interdistrict transfer students bring in more money than it costs to educate them, resulting in a net gain for district finances. 

The lion’s share of school district revenues come from the state and are paid out on the basis of the district’s overall attendance numbers in a given year. More students means more revenue – roughly $24 more for each day those students attend school. 

During the tenure of former Superintendent Jack McLaughlin, who left earlier this year, the Berkeley school district actually had an informal policy of trying to encourage school enrollment growth in order to increase education dollars the district receives from the state, Dunn-Ruiz said. 

And, Berkeley school district enrollment growth outstripped the state average for unified school districts between 1995 and 1999, growing at more than 4 percent annually, from 8,308 students in the 1995/1996 school year to 9,400 students in the 1998/1999 school year. 

But Berkeley’s robust school programs and low student/teacher ratios can be traced, in large measure, to the millions of dollars Berkeley taxpayers shell out each year under the Berkeley Public Schools Educational Excellence Project tax measure, passed by voters in 1994. Under that measure, Berkeley schools have $5.3 million a year to pay for additional teachers to keep class sizes small, for example. But it is a fixed number, and as district enrollment grows, the funds are not enough to meet the district’s class-size reduction goals. 

As a result of interdistrict transfer students, “we have the district gaining some money, but on the other hand it’s diluting the enrichment funds,” Dunn-Ruiz said. 

Furthermore, there is broad consensus among district administrators that Berkeley High School, with its 3,300 students, has outgrown its 17-acre campus. More than 40 percent of Berkeley’s interdistrict transfer students, or 281 kids, are Berkeley High students. Selawsky said he wanted to know how much those 281 students impact the school’s limited resources. 

“That’s the kind of information that we need,” he said. “It’s important to separate the anecdotal stuff from reality.” 

Berkeley resident Kris Hardie actually opted to send her son to Albany High school, fearing that he would not cope well at Berkeley High after his years in a small, private elementary school. 

“There are not as many issues with violence and fights,” at Albany high school, Hardie said, as she filled out transfer forms at the Student Services Office in Berkeley on Wednesday.  

“Although I know Berkeley has some great programs, so it’s kind of a trade off,” she added. 

Selawsky said he is not suggesting current interdistrict transfer students should be removed from Berkeley schools, but merely asking how interdistrict policies might be used in the future to control enrollment growth, should such an action prove desirable. 

Berkeley school district Interim Superintendent Stephen Goldstone said reducing the high school’s enrollment could have significant negative impacts as well.  

Since large schools such as the high school can spread out their costs, the expense of educating a few hundred more students is relatively small, Goldstone said. As a result, much of the state money brought in by interdistrict transfer students could be available to support other district programs in need of more funding, he said. 

Goldstone said district staff are working on “refining” some of the information around inter-district transfer issues to provide more definitive answers to the questions raised by Selawsky an others. The information will be presented to the school board during a public forum some time next month, he said.