Cheers and jeers for parent choice positions in Harlan area dispute

Here’s a cheer for the Harlan Independent School District for not caving in to the Harlan County School District (which gets the jeers) over an attempt to reduce parent choice in the region.

The two districts are negotiating a renewal of a long-standing agreement that allows parents residing in one of the district’s jurisdictions to send their children to schools in the adjoining district. The Harlan Daily Enterprise reports the Harlan County system wanted to contract this option significantly.

Such transfer agreements, where available at all, represent about the only public school choice options available in Kentucky outside of some limited options when schools fail No Child Left Behind. These inter-district transfer agreements have been under attack by people in some school systems who want to treat children as some sort of negotiable commodities instead of the young citizens they actually are.