Luckily, the three kids were attending Highlander Charter School when the mom’s marriage began to fall apart. As a charter that draws from many districts, the school could keep the children enrolled no matter where they lived. Unlike other Highlander moms I’ve spoken with, this one barely mentioned the qualities of the popular school. Instead she talked about being profoundly grateful that the school provided a stable environment for her kids during the dark period when they moved several times to different living situations in different communities. The kids continued to learn, among friends and familiar teachers, even amid the upheaval of divorce. The mom has settled since, and things are better. Educational stability greatly helped.

A district public-school kid would have been bounced from school to school, as if the residential changes weren’t bad enough. Some districts at least allow mobile kids to finish out the year, but since they don’t also provide transportation, even that amount of stability often doesn’t work out.

Caroline Caswell, principal of East Providence High School (EPHS), says that each year about 25 percent of her student population is mobile, either coming or going. “We get Coventry kids from Section 8 and subsidized housing whose parents had to get jobs and move. The town has several group homes, with kids in and out. And a lot of students are switching between mom and dad, or sometimes Grandma’s house is here.” One student had a fight with her custodial guardian and moved to a family member’s home in Woonsocket. She’s trying to finish the year at EPHS, but getting to school is a big problem without public student transportation, so she’s often late or absent.

Furthermore, Caswell grumbles that the state never asks how long the kid has been with the school when statewide tests hold the school accountable for performance. And while she believes Rhode Island’s new diploma system is great for the stable kids, mobile students frequently come with no work in hand toward graduation, and can’t possibly build a graduation portfolio in the time they have left at EPHS. “The state’s new diploma system would certainly benefit from greater student stability.”

According to Kids Count, Central Falls’ mobility rate is 40 percent. In the state as a whole, the rate is 18 percent. Demographers call this “churning.” Research shows that mobile children are far more likely to drop out of school, partly because their education has “holes,” which is to say they missed learning foundational skills.

Changing schools is often traumatic for the kid. And that kid’s trauma is burdensome and disruptive to teachers and fellow students.

So, since calming student mobility would be a great mercy to kids, families and schools, the state needs to do two things.

First, it needs to pass legislation allowing open enrollment, so families can send their kids to whatever school they want, regardless of district boundaries, provided there is room. In the case of the highly mobile kids, open enrollment would allow them to stay put, if that’s what their families want. Why should charter-school students be the only ones for whom public school can be a stabilizing force in an otherwise uprooted existence? In other states, open enrollment — also known as cross-district, public-school choice — has met with all sorts of happy results, including higher parent satisfaction, stronger schools and significant fiscal savings. Here, it would also reduce student mobility and its ill effects.

The second thing the mobile kids would need is a statewide transportation system. Thankfully, this is already in the works. Of course, the state’s main goal is to tame the cost and waste involved in 36 different bus contracts crisscrossing buses all over the state to deliver private, charter and special-education students. We’ve all seen the big yellow buses driving around, wasting gas, with one or two children on board. I live by a special-education school where it always seems as though 36 big yellow buses unload one child — on a good day, two. The state Education, Administration and Transportation departments have been aware of this madness for some time, but have finally gotten together to phase in a statewide student transportation system that will be fully operational — for out-of-district and in-district busing — by 2010.

Connecticut and Massachusetts have already been down this road and found that a centralized student-transportation system saves 15 to 20 percent just from streamlining routes, which reduces the number of buses. Last year, Rhode Island’s student transportation cost $86.6 million, without taking into consideration the hard-to-quantify administrative costs.

But quite apart from saving buckets of money, a statewide bus system will get that Woonsocket child to her East Providence school with a regularity that doesn’t depend on begging rides from family members. Busing kept those Highlander kids stable in their school while their parents split up. The highly mobile urban child could at least have a cumulative education in the same building with the same friends and teachers instead of constantly going through the misery of being the new kid and irritating those to whom she is new. A little bit of busing could go a long way to calming the troubled lives of that mobile 18 percent of Rhode Island’s student population.

The state should not force the mobile kid to bounce around tiny school districts in an ugly game of hot potato because the district boundaries are more important than the kid or his education. This mobility doesn’t save anyone money, nor does it serve the kid, the school, or efforts to improve public education. Let’s calm it.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.