Plymouth Family Copes with School District Transfer Freeze
A family in Plymouth says it’s facing a dilemma as the school year is getting underway.
The Wiskow family has three boys, one of whom just started kindergarten on Tuesday.
However, due to a policy in the Osseo Area School School District, he won’t start his classes in the same school as his siblings.
“This is not right, I don’t agree with putting policies over families, right?” said father Cory Wiskow. “Here we have a 5-year-old that just wants to be with his brothers.”
The family had planned to send Carson Wiskow, the youngest son in the family of five, to Cedar Island Elementary, the school his two brothers attend.
He already attended preschool classes at Cedar Island, and the family expected that he would be able to follow in his brothers’ footsteps.
However, the school district said he couldn’t enroll into the school for kindergarten and would instead need to enroll at nearby Oak View Elementary.
According to a district spokesperson, new attendance boundaries are going into effect starting fall 2026.
As a result, in-district school transfers — where a student attends an in-district school not assigned to their address — have been paused for two years.
That pause began mid-January, which is typically the deadline for priority applications for in-district transfers.
Cory Wiskow and his wife, Christina, formally asked the district this summer to make an exception, but that request was denied.
As a result, they said it was a challenging morning for Carson as he got on the bus.
“Seeing him get on the bus, I mean, that was difficult, right?” Christina said. “Just because there was, there wasn’t his big brothers or anybody that he knew on the bus to sort of comfort him and help him, right? I could tell that he really wanted to run off the bus.”
The three boys all could attend Oak View Elementary, their assigned school. However, according to their parents, the two boys at Cedar Island were not interested in changing schools.
Families will be eligible for in-district transfers for the fall 2027 enrollment period.
This story was updated on Sept. 3.
