Yoav Lurie: BVSD should expand sibling enrollment preference districtwide

This commentary is by Yoav Lurie, the parent of a Summit Middle School student and a Foothill Elementary student, a former Teach For America staff member and a Boulder-based entrepreneur.

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Last year, when my daughter got into Summit Middle Charter School through the lottery, our family did something we hadn’t planned: We explored Boulder Valley School District, liked what we saw and pulled both kids out of private school. We were especially worried about the middle school transition. What we found at Summit impressed us.

Our daughter walked into a school where teachers knew families, where eighth graders looked out for sixth graders and where the parent community was organized and connected. Three months in, our daughter was thriving, and a lot of that came from Summit’s strong community.

As a new BVSD family, we were the beneficiaries of a school foundation built by countless families over 30 years. 

That foundation is exactly what BVSD is now proposing to weaken through a middle school policy change that is slated to be finalized in the next few weeks without public meetings or open debate. In charter renewal negotiations with Summit Middle School, BVSD is pushing to eliminate the graduate-sibling enrollment preference Summit has used since 1996.

Summit, like all BVSD schools, gives enrollment preference to siblings of currently enrolled students. Uniquely, it extends that same preference to the younger siblings of Summit graduates. BVSD wants to eliminate the second piece, citing equity and consistency with district policy.

A disclosure: My younger child could benefit from the preference I’m defending. But the strongest case for keeping the preference isn’t about families like mine. It’s about the families who don’t yet know they need it.

The right move isn’t to take Summit’s preference away. The right move is to give every BVSD school the same tool. The preference is especially important for middle schools because the transition from fifth to sixth grade is one of the most perilous periods in childhood. Three decades of research, anchored in Jacquelynne Eccles and Robert Roeser’s “stage-environment fit” framework, show consistent declines in motivation, sense of belonging, mental health and academic engagement in middle school.

The transition to middle school is most reliably improved through relational trust built between families and schools. Harvard’s Karen Mapp, who authored the federal “this capacity takes time to build. When a school builds bonds with families over years, it accumulates relationships, institutional memory and engagement infrastructure that benefits every student. 

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The graduate-sibling preference isn’t simply about siblings. It is the structural mechanism that allows a school to accumulate family-school capacity across cohorts. While BVSD’s primary case is consistency across schools, some have argued that graduate-sibling preference benefits the most well-resourced families. The empirical evidence points the other way.

A 2019 study of 230,000 English sibling pairs by Cheti Nicoletti and Birgitta Rabe found that older-to-younger sibling improvements in academic achievement are statistically significant. Notably, those improvements are higher for siblings from less privileged backgrounds. Why? Because sibling-shared school knowledge compensates for what parents may not have themselves: institutional savvy, faculty relationships and cultural literacy. The older sibling becomes the channel. A 2023 study in the Journal of Human Resources by Krzysztof Karbownik and Umut Özek replicated those same findings: Positive older-to-younger sibling improvements were greater in less affluent families.

Any family who joins Summit — whether they just moved to Boulder or don’t have the time or networks to navigate a complex lottery — inherits the school community. Eliminating graduate-sibling preferences does the most damage to the families with the least access to alternative school-knowledge channels. Their elimination is anti-equity.  

BVSD is right that there’s an inequity in the current open enrollment policy: One school can form strong bonds with open-enrolled families regardless of birth spacing, while the rest lose out on those partnerships. 

The fix isn’t to take the preference away from one school. It’s to extend it to all schools. Specifically, BVSD should amend the JECC-R preferences to add a sub-point under sibling/household preferences for siblings who have graduated from the school.

Such a change requires district staff, study and a deliberate amendment process. In the meantime, BVSD should leave Summit’s preference in place and convene a working group, with voices from across the district, to study extending it.

This is a low-cost lever that will improve outcomes for existing and new families and strengthen school foundations across the district.

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Don’t level Summit down. Level BVSD up.