The Ins and Outs of Interdistrict Transfers

Part 3 in the SoCo Schools series looks at school choice

Because of its deep budget crisis, the Santa Rosa City Schools District is restricting students from transferring outside the district, which is a change in policy and practice around interdistrict transfers. This decision will impact the ability of Santa Rosa parents to choose a school that best fits their child’s needs. It will also impact the West County schools that have welcomed students from outside their district, in part to bolster their own enrollment. The change is catching parents unawares, as it is not widely publicized, but some parents are already fighting to place their children in the school of their choice.

“This is my choice. This is my child. I should be able to decide where he goes to school.”
– Angie Hendrix

One parent not taking ‘no’ for an answer

Angie Hendrix lives in Santa Rosa off Piner Road. She has three sons, one of whom is an eighth grader at Willowside. Angie expected that he would go to Analy High School next year. “I intentionally applied to go to Oak Grove eight years ago, knowing that’s how it’s always been; if you’re in West County, you go to Analy.” Her son would be following the same path as her elder son, who is now 26. “Analy was where I wanted my kids to go,” she said. ”We are part of the community in West County, and we have family out there. We just can’t afford to live out there.” Her husband went to Analy and her in-laws live in Sebastopol.

The high school of residence for the Hendrix family is Piner High School. “We pay our taxes for that school, and I’ve said yes to every bond measure. I support my local school, but I just could never picture my kid going there.”

In October 2025, she started the process to apply for an interdistrict transfer for her 8th grade son. She went to the SRCS district office in person and handed in the form. She thought the transfer form would be signed right away, as it was in the past. She even recognized Yolanda Silva, the same person who had signed the transfer form in a previous year. Angie was totally surprised when Ms. Silva said that she could not sign the transfer form.

“What do you mean you can’t sign it? You’ve signed my paper before. What’s different today?” asked Angie.

Yolanda explained that there was a hold on interdistrict transfers.

Angie asked why.

Yolanda said she would get Stacy. “When Stacy came out, she didn’t want to tell me about this new policy. I asked ‘What policy? Since when is this new policy?’ You need to give me a reason why you’re not signing it. They didn’t want to tell me and I thought, this is weird.”

Stacy told her that on Tuesday, the day prior, there was a board meeting. “Santa Rosa’s decided that we’re going to hold on releasing transfers; we’re only gonna allow 3% of students to transfer. We will be holding these until January.”

“I am mad. I leave,” said Angie. On her way out, she called her friend who told her that she was on the way to district office to get the transfer papers signed for her son, also a student at Willowside. Angie waited for her friend and together they went into the district office. They were told the same story – the district won’t sign any transfers.

“I’m very pushy,” said Angie. “I don’t take no for an answer very easily. Especially when I feel like you’re messing with my kid.”

Later she called Analy and talked to someone in the district office. “Do you know that Santa Rosa is not allowing kids to transfer to your school?” Apparently, Analy didn’t know about the change. She called Windsor. They didn’t know about it either.

Interdistricts transfers have been common, and easy in West County

For many years, parents from Santa Rosa City Schools as well as other districts have been able to transfer to West County school districts without any obstacles. Years ago, some of the K-8 districts such as Twin Hills, Gravenstein and Oak Grove became a type of charter school, known as a dependent charter, that does not require incoming students outside the district to have an interdistrict transfer. The expectation of parents like Angie Hendrix was that their children would move through K-8 schools in Sebastopol and West County and then move on to Analy. Now parents are being told by Santa Rosa City Schools that they have no choice; their student must attend their school of residence.

The leadership of the Santa Rosa City Schools has made a number of poor decisions in recent years, leading to a large budget deficit. When Santa Rosa moved middle schools on to high school campuses last Spring, they assumed that parents would go along with the decision. Some refused to go along. Parents, looking for options, explored private schools, charter schools and homeschooling, which includes online schooling. One of those options was to transfer their student out of their home district to a public school in a different district.

At a public meeting held in the fall by the Santa Rosa Teachers Association (SRTA), a union official reported that over 500 families left the district. Others have said that this number is low. That loss of revenue from those students leaving the district means that the projected deficit for SRCS grew worse.

Not everyone in the education system likes to see parents exploring their options. Roxanne McNally, herself a teacher, and board president for 2025 for Santa Rosa City Schools, said this in her message to district in December:

For the sake of students now and students in the future, keep your child enrolled in this district, remain in your job in this district, stay with us. We cannot give in to the idea that school choice, charter schools and private schools, will save us, because they will not. They will leave our marginalized students and families behind. Charter and private schools are not held to the same laws, the same standards of equity, as public schools. Free and public education is the basis of a free and democratic society.

Where students go

All districts lose students and they also gain some, too. In a board presentation in December, Analy principal Chuck Wade had two slides showing the percentage of students leaving the district for the current school year. Forty percent of the students who leave the district go to Windsor High School and almost 22% go to Tech High.

A second slide ranked the reasons for leaving, identifying specialized programs that other schools are not offered in their own district school.

In the district, which has about 1,500 students with 1,400 at Analy, one-third of the students come from Sebastopol; one-third come from West County; and another third are transfers from outside the district. This has been both an opportunity and a challenge. Transfer students have created an opportunity to mitigate the overall trend of declining enrollment in West County and Sebastopol. It’s also been a challenge to handle a more diverse student body, something that administrators have recognized as a benefit to the school. (The 9th grade teams proposal presented at that meeting was largely designed to help integrate 9th grade students from different backgrounds and schools into Analy.)

The numbers of transfer students coming to Analy from SRCS has steady increased over the last three years.

New freshman transferring from SRCS

25-26: 118
24-25: 114
23-24: 96

At the most recent board meeting, the presentation of a demographic study showed a spatial or geographic analysis of where WSCUHSD students come from. The cluster of black dots west of the district (in purple) is Santa Rosa and 396 from there are coming to Analy.

The demographic study showed that projected enrollment in the district would remain somewhat steady in future years. However, removing the 300-400 students from SRCS would bring enrollment down near 1,000 in a few years.

To be clear, Analy is not selective about which students from Santa Rosa it accepts; it is not cherry-picking high achievers, for instance. For some transfer students, coming to Analy is an opportunity to get a better education but also build new friendships. The influx of students from Santa Rosa to Sebastopol has turned Analy into a multicultural campus and brought greater diversity to West County.

Working the system

One of the things that bothered Angie Hendrix is that she could find nothing in writing about the new interdistrict transfer policy. The district’s web page did not say anything about it at the time. She watched the video recording for November 12th board meeting where she heard it was discussed. “It was a four-and-a-half hour meeting,” she said. “When they brought up the topic of student transfers, I kid you not, it was less than 30 seconds of conversation. They said “transfers are going to be processed as usual.” (A request to the district transfer office for a written policy didn’t not get a reply. There’s a link on the Interdistrict Transfer page to the board policy, but it returned a 404 error.)

She began to work the system. She learned that she could identify a specialized program that was not offered in the home district as a way to get the transfer approved. She asked Yolanda to tell her “exactly what specialized program means to you and what documents I need to provide, indicating this reason for me to send my child to the school.” Angie thought that Yolanda “sympathized with the people coming in because she recognizes a lot of them.” She didn’t like being the bad guy. She gave Angie some guidance about looking for programs and then comparing it to schools withing the district.

Angie talked to Superintendent Chris Meredith and asked him about specialized programs that are unique to Analy. “We went to the open house at Analy with my son. We looked at specific programs and we liked two of them.” One was AP Capstone. She got a letter from Analy describing the AP Capstone program, and she dropped off the letter to SRCS district office. A few weeks later she got an email saying that the transfer was denied. “The note said that AP Capstone was available in other Santa Rosa schools,” she said. “It didn’t tell me what school or provide any information.” Her emails to the district office were not responded to. “I then proceeded to call every single school and asked ‘Do you have AP Capstone?’ No. Piner, Montgomery, Elsie Allen, Maria Carillo, all of ‘em. I called all of them. The only school that ended up calling me back with a ‘yes’ was Maria Carillo. The person said it’s not the same exact program, but it is very similar.”

Even if Maria Carrilo was an option, the word was that intra district transfers (to other schools in SRCS) were also limited. However, Maria Carillo wasn’t a realistic option because it was 30 minutes away in the opposite direction, and she had to drive her young son to Oak Grove.

The other program that Angie and her son identified was called Globally Proficient Scholars (GPS). She got a letter from Analy describing the GPS program and dropped it off at the district office.

Angie waited three weeks for a reply, which didn’t come until early January from Yolanda. The GPS program wasn’t available in any of the Santa Rosa schools, and they could not deny the transfer. “Yolanda said to me: ‘You were very strategic; you did not let go of this fight. you were determined to get a yes.’”

Angie recognized that “there are parents that don’t have the bandwidth to put in the fight.” Indeed, a contested process for interdistrict transfers does impact families without the time and resources to engage in this process.

From the start, Angie knew that she not going to accept the decision of SRCS and remain in the district. “My son is my job,” she said. “My kids are what I do every day. If I had to find a charter high school and take them to Rohnert Park, that’s exactly what I would’ve done. There would be no way in hell that they’re gonna tell me that he has to go to a Santa Rosa school if I choose not to send him there. He’s my child.” Parents will find a way.

Appealing transfer decisions

Meredith and West Sonoma County Union High School district administrators have helped a number of parents navigate the this process. Parents can appeal a denial of an interdistrict transfer to the Sonoma County Office of Education. Two weeks ago, all three appeals for Analy were successful. The week following one more family won their appeal.

Certainly, WSCHUD has their own self-interest in growing enrollment at the expense of Santa Rosa City Schools. Yet Analy is considered one of the best schools in the county and will attract families that want that kind of school. Not all schools are the same, as evidenced by the CAASPP test scores, discussed in Part 2. But there is more to know about a school than looking at test scores and deciding whether it is a good fit for your child. Some families transfer because of sports or art programs. Tech High in Cotati is one of the best schools in the county, one that Angie would have considered. Half of its students come from outside the district.

As one administrators said, “Do you really want to punish schools that do a better job? Do you want to hold students back from schools that have more innovative programs and approaches?” One might add, do you want to force parents to send their children to schools with a record of a poor achievement and inadequate leadership?

At a board meeting for Santa Rosa City Schools this week that presented the drastic cuts within the district for next year’s budget, Kathryn Howell, President of the Santa Rosa Teachers Association asked the board:

What in the world is going to attract families to Santa Rosa City Schools? Can we actually sustain a school district by forcing the families to stay? With declining enrollment constantly threatening this house of cards, what is the plan to fight the loss of families and students? Is there one?

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For transparency's sake, the author, Dale Dougherty, a co-owner of this news site, is a donor and volunteer at the Academy of Innovative Arts in Forestville, which includes interdistrict and intradistrict transfer students.

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