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.
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 expected 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 “Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships,” found that 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.
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.
Don’t level Summit down. Level BVSD up.
Agree 100%. Thank you for writing this.
Except Summit is the only middle school in Boulder where there is real admission demand with a long wait list. First and foremost, this is a public school where everyone deserves the same probability of admission. Go back to private if you want an elitist experience with legacy admissions.
Bob, should a financially struggling family that gets into Summit have a sibling preference policy that would obviously benefit them according to the evidence Yoav cited? Would that be considered “legacy admission” ?
Tell that to the kids who didn’t get a spot because it went to legacy admits. Next we’ll be giving priority spots to big donors!
Summit’s sibling preference policy was a big factor in us choosing to send our rising 6th grader there, as opposed to a K-12 school like Peak to Peak or Prospect Ridge (in Adams 12), as our two kids having a consistent & shared educational experience was important to us. We told her younger sister, a rising 3rd grader, that she would also be going to Summit and she’s very excited. We are shocked to find out that BVSD is trying to change this policy without any notice. While we agree with the above article that Summit’s existing policy should be maintained and even expanded to other schools, BVSD should, at a minimum grandfather in families that have already relied on the existing policy in making their school selection.
Why would your kid deserve a better chance of admission than my kid? We both pay the same taxes, and we all deserve the same chance of admission to the No. 1 ranked public middle school in CO. Get in line with the rest of us or go to private school. The Board notified Summit in 2023-24, and the DC published a 2024 article on this topic.
What if you can’t afford private school? Does it not make sense for families to go to the same school? This seems like common sense for anyone who understands the foundation of a good community.
Notice was provided in 2023-24 and the DC published an article in Feb. 2024 on this exact plan. This change does not restrict any child from attending Summit and joining the general lottery with the rest of us, so no one should be claiming victim when this is really about implementing a policy of parity. If you want legacy admissions, go to private school.
Why do you assume everyone can afford private school? Summit has a lottery system that allows anyone to get in regardless of their financial situation.
This piece is spot on.
It makes no sense that BVSD is considering removing the sibling enrollment preference; this is an antagonistic threat to the Summit community and threatens the very thing our very good schools here in BVSD work so hard to build and cultivate. The single biggest contributor to this community fabric is seeing entire families pass through the same schools. Yes, Summit is a charter school, but that shouldn’t be reason to explicitly deny the sibling preference that is an implicit implicit feature in all other BVSD schools.
I recommend you look into private school if you want legacy admissions.
Bob if you can afford private school why don’t you just send your kids to private school? Not everyone can afford it and its not fair for you to assume that.
Well said Yoav. People completely underestimate the benefits of families building a community together at a school. It seems anyone against this policy is just easily blinded by their ideologies where everything is zero sum and you have to bring down something good to improve something that is bad.