by Winston Chua

ARCADIA - Beverly Hills has been typically known for its wealth and strong education system. It is no surprise, then, that parents who live outside BHUSD and expected that their children attend the aforementioned city’s district are upset that their own will no longer be granted that privilege.

“As a parent, what you want for your youngster is to start them in school and have them finish there,” San Gabriel Superintendent Susan Parks said. “It’s ideal to start them and finish them at school with a strong peer group, friendships and teachers.”

Tuesday night, the Los Angeles County Office of Education rejected appeals made by parents who were pining to have their children attend BHUSD. As part of a BHUSD compromise, students currently enrolled at the high school on permit will be allowed to have their permits renewed, including last year’s freshmen.

So far, LACOE has rejected 25 appeals and granted seven. BHUSD moved into a Basic Aid category earlier this year, meaning that local property tax revenues in the area exceed the sum of funding that the state would have provided.

School districts can move into the Basic Aid formula as a result of the state’s fiscal crisis.

To the extent that BHUSD is, in effect, pushing students away, West San Gabriel Valley cities simply cannot afford to do so. In Alhambra, San Gabriel and Arcadia, revenue limits are tied substantially to the average daily attendance (ADA), the average number of students who attended school over the course of a year.

ADA figures help determine the total amount of state revenue.

In the Alhambra Unified School District, the revenue limit for the upcoming year is $98 million, $80 million of which is state aid and $18 million of which is from property tax. Denise Jaramillo, the assistant superintendent of financial services for Alhambra Unified, said there would be “no benefit to funding based on purely property tax.”

Arcadia Unified will receive about $5,000 per student from the state for the school year 2010-11, or about $49 million.

Ken Shelton, the assistant superintendent of business services for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, said that the state does not fund public education when the property tax yield, made up of commercial and residential sources, is greater than what the a particular district is entitled to, with some exceptions.

“It’s not a district choice,” he said. “It’s a combination of factors that move districts into Basic Aid status.” What can happen is that when property tax revenues are high, districts receive les state aid.

SGUSD’s Parks said that her district would not be able to survive with Basic Aid because many homeowners, who have lived in San Gabriel for a long time, pay very little in property taxes. The effect of Serrano v. Priest and Proposition 13, which limits property tax revenue, is said to have led to the decline in quality education in California.

The Arcadia Unified School District also depends on the state for much of its funding, because it simply could not survive on property taxes alone. The bad part about this is that when the State struggles, so does AUSD. In Arcadia, the numbers still point to per-pupil funding as a reliable income source.

In Arcadia, one of the few times the city rejects students is if the students has moved to another city and has not completed their junior year in school.

Arcadia School Board member Joann Steinmeier said that her district believes that students should be a part of the district they belong in. One case where students don’t belong as part of her district is bad behavior, that being the main exclusionary rule.

Arcadia USD transfers roughly the same amount of students out of district as they take in.