Families want homes moved into Prosser School District

Some families living in Yakima County west of Prosser are petitioning to have their homes transferred from the Mabton School District to the Prosser district.

Educational Service District 105 in Yakima notified the districts last month of the citizen-initiated petition led by Prosser City Clerk Rachel Shaw.

The Prosser School Board will meet Dec. 21 to talk about the request. Mabton school officials are also reviewing the petition to determine their next steps. ESD 105 told both districts they have until Feb. 10 to come to an agreement on the issue.

“We don’t have any definitive answers at this point or a response to the petition,” said Mabton Superintendent Minerva Morales.

More than a dozen school-age children live in the residential development off Byron Hill Road between Highway 22 and Wells Gap Road.

Under state law, a transfer of property between school districts can happen if more than 50 percent of the people living there provide a written petition to education officials.

Such changes don’t just affect where students end up attending school. Transferring property between districts affects school district tax bases, changing how much money a district can borrow and how much the cost of a bond or levy is spread among taxpayers.

The request also is challenging because the districts are in different counties.

Prosser Superintendent Ray Tolcacher said many of the students are already attending Prosser schools because they were grandfathered in as out-of-district transfers years before the district stopped accepting such students because of overcrowding concerns. However, that arrangement doesn’t mean the students’ homes are technically part of the district.

“It’s a complicated situation,” he said.

Shaw and her neighbors began actively pursuing the transfer earlier this year, according to letters she submitted to ESD 105.

She collected signatures from 22 people in mid-September and filed them with officials. The Yakima County Auditor’s Office in November certified the survey as containing enough valid signatures to validate the petition.

Shaw could not be reached Friday, but in her letter to ESD 105, she noted that the neighborhood, which overlooks the Yakima River and Sunnyside Wildlife Recreation Area, is relatively new and was marketed with Prosser addresses.

Despite being in Yakima County, home buyers were told they’d have the option of sending their kids to Prosser or Mabton, she wrote.

“It was our understanding that as parents we had the choice to send our children to either district, which is currently not the case,” Shaw said in the letter. “At some point over the last few years, the (Prosser) district was closed to outside residents, creating an issue which subsequently prompted the request for an annexation.”

Most parents in the area also work in Prosser, and some children in the neighborhood attend Prosser daycares or after-school activities. The petition to move the neighborhood permanently into the Prosser School District is an issue of inconvenience, but also educational and social disruption, Shaw wrote.

“Our children have established relationships with students and teachers, as well as familiarity with the Prosser schools which could prove to be difficult on both the child and the parents to relocate,” Shaw said.

Mabton, which is about six miles from the neighborhood, is a much smaller district than Prosser with fewer than 1,000 students and only two schools — an elementary and a combined junior-senior high school.

Almost all of its students are Latino and from low-income families. Nearly half are English language learners.

Prosser, about seven miles west of Byron Hill Road, has more than 2,800 students and six schools. More than 60 percent of its students are Latino and about 70 percent receive free or reduced-price school meals.

The school districts must meet to negotiate the land transfer before Feb. 10. If they can’t agree, a mediator can be appointed to resolve the issue.

If that doesn’t work, the residents can ask ESD 105 to appoint a regional committee to make a decision.

This story was originally published December 19, 2015 at 9:14 PM with the headline "Families want homes moved into Prosser School District."