Can’t afford to live in Beverly Hills? Your child still may be able to go to school there

The best public schools in California are often keen on keeping families out. In coveted districts like Beverly Hills, La Cañada, Laguna Beach or South Pasadena, the homes are prohibitively expensive for most middle-class and working-class families, so the high-performing schools seem out of reach. These districts will even hire private eyes to conduct residency checks, so that they can expel any students who live outside the district boundaries.

But there’s a simple and legal way to enroll in these top-notch public schools, even if you can’t afford to live there. By California law, you are allowed to apply for an interdistrict transfer. Both the “sending” and “receiving” district must approve your request. However, if either district denies that request, you have a legal right to appeal that denial to the county board of education.

And those appeals are usually granted. Look, for example, at the L.A. County Board of Education and the Orange County Board of Education. One leans left, and the other leans right. But both boards are in the habit of overturning the vast majority of these interdistrict transfer denials. In 2025, 96% of the appeals in L.A. County led to the student’s admission to the desired school district. (Eighty-three percent were granted by the board, and an additional 14% of the denials were overturned by the district before the appeals hearing.) In Orange County, the success rate for 2025 appeals was 89%.

It just doesn’t seem right that a public school would turn away a child because he or she lives on the wrong side of the tracks.

In other counties, it appears that the success rate can be lower. In Alameda County, for example, appeals to the board in 2025 were only successful in 38% of cases that were heard in open session (the only appeals in which the resolution is published). Other county boards — including San Diego, San Francisco and Contra Costa — appear not to publish the results of such appeals.

It’s easy to see why these appeals are often granted. Our current system is fundamentally unjust. When the board members hear from parents who feel that they are being turned away from a public school, they are likely to feel the tug of common decency and sympathy. It just doesn’t seem right that a public school would turn away a child because he or she lives on the wrong side of the tracks.

My organization has shown how these exclusionary lines — both school district boundaries and attendance zone lines within a school district — drive up real estate prices in appealing neighborhoods, exacerbating the affordable housing crisis. What’s more, these lines often determine the fate of whole neighborhoods. A microneighborhood that finds itself excluded from a nearby high-quality school will often see young families migrate out over time, leading to economic and social decline.

But the most important effect of the lines is that they sort 5-year-old children — incoming kindergartners — into winners and losers based simply on whether they live on one side of the street or another. Our recent report showed that, in many LA neighborhoods, a child on one side of the street can be assigned to a school where over 80% of the children are reading at grade level, while their playmate who lives across the street will be assigned to a school where fewer than 25% of the kids are reading at grade level.

What’s so troubling about this system is that it echoes one of the most shameful government policies of the last 100 years: redlining. In the 1930s, a federal agency — the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation or HOLC — drew maps of hundreds of American cities, designating certain neighborhoods at “desirable,” “best,” “declining” or “hazardous.” Areas with more people of color, shaded red or yellow on these maps, found that they were unable to access government housing assistance.

Today, our best public schools have similar maps that lock out families — of all races — who live in more diverse, working-class neighborhoods and prevent them from accessing a high-quality public school. And many of these school maps are disturbingly similar to the redlining maps of the same neighborhood that were published back in the 1930s.

Is it any wonder that so many families choose to lie about their address to get their kids into a quality public school? So common is this maneuver that it has burbled up into pop culture, being featured as a plot line in episodes of “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Friday Night Lights” and even “The Simpsons.”

More parents need to be aware of their options under state law. The appeals process is a reliable way to give your child a shot at a public school that might change the whole trajectory of his or her life. For more information, visit the website of your county board of education: Alameda County, Contra Costa County, Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, San Diego County, San Francisco and Ventura County.

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Tim DeRoche is the founder and president of Available to All, a nonpartisan watchdog that defends equal access to public schools.

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