Educational Guardianship/Options

[fantesia28]

What is the name of your state? Missouri

I have a situation with our current school district - long story short. The school is 18 miles from our home and we have another school that is only 5 miles away. However, currently we reside in the boundry lines of the further away school. We tried to get the discrict changed and went through arbitration, but it did not pass (we even have 2 districts that bring school buses to our subdivion). The other school was so worried about losing tax dollars that they wouldn't budge on their stance. So we had resigned ourselves to the fact that our children would be attending the district within our subdivision.

The issue at hand is that the schools transportation department is refusing to come into our neighborhood to pick up the kids. They will only come to the top of the subdivision. Our kids are 6 and 14 and we live 2.5 miles in the back of the subdivision. This is too far and too dangerous for our children to be walking this distance!! I have contacted the Missouri Department of Education which states that it is the districts decision as to if they will come into the subdivision. This is NOT acceptable to me. My husband and I both work so the kids will have to walk from the bus stop home, this is leaving them in an unsafe situation. I feel that if the school wanted our subdivision in their disctrict so bad, then they should be willing to make this accomodation for us. We live on paved roads and there are various turnarounds available for the bus.

So either we need to find out what our rights might be to get this fixed OR we have thought about the possibility of doing an educational guardianship where my grandparents live for the kids to go to their school district. I don't know what an educational guardianship entails, what constitutes getting one and how to even go about obtaining one.

Can you please give me some information on educational guardianships and how we could obtain one? Also, if you have any suggestions on other things we could look into or try to enforce with the school district on the bus issue that would be greatly appreciated!! I am at a loss as to what to do at this point and my kids should be starting school in 2 weeks.

Thank you so much!!

[SHORTY LONG]

Have you made personal contact with your locale Board of Education to
discuss the matter with them?

[countrymom]

I am having about the same problem, I live 5 minutes from the school that I went to growing up, and then we live close to 20 min from the one my husband went to, the problem is that my husband and I want our daughters to go to the closer, smaller school, it has like 40 students in Pre-K to 8th grade. We are curently paying $15 a day/ one day a week to send our oldest there for Pre-K but the price for Kindergarden is $5000 a year, and we can't afford that. We are almost 2 miles out of that school district, we were told that we could give gardainship of education to my grandmother, sister, or mother, but I do not know how to go about that, or what the bylines consist of. We really like the smaller school, there are only 5 in our daughters class, so that gives you more one on one with the teacher, and you wouldn't believe this, but that teacher even has 2 aids that help off and on throughout the day. Please help me to find out how to send her to this other school distrist. Oh, the larger school, is the only other school in the county, so all the children from all the other towns go there so that makes between 60-80 children per grade level. We just live in the country so that would be so overwelming for our little girls.