The majority of Howard County children who used new federal legislation to request transfers out of the system's lowest-performing schools were neither behind in their lessons nor poor, groups the government had in mind when requiring public school choice.

Of the 2,300 county pupils who were eligible to opt out of schools with low test scores, 62 have applied for transfers.

Some Howard officials think that small number gives the impression that most parents are satisfied with the schools their children are in or are willing to work with the schools as they struggle to improve.

"It's encouraging," said Ray Ellen Levene, the district's Title I coordinator. "And what's interesting to me is that the schools that are starting to improve, they only had two or three students" apply.

Six Howard elementary schools were eligible to participate in the program established by last year's No Child Left Behind Act .

The act allows parents to switch their children to higher-performing schools from schools that have high poverty levels, receive Title I funding and fail to improve their scores on achievement tests for two consecutive years.

Bryant Woods Elementary School had two requests for transfers, and Phelps Luck had three. Guilford Elementary had the most, with 21 requests. Dasher Green had 14, and Swansfield and Talbott Springs had 11 each.

"We consider this a very small number," said school district spokeswoman Patti Caplan.

Also noteworthy is who applied.

The transfer legislation allows school districts to give first priority in providing choice to pupils who are among the schools' lowest-performing and from families with the lowest incomes. Each tier of priority consistently favors low-performing and low-income pupils to those who are affluent and are doing well in school.

In Howard, 18 percent of the transfer applicants were from the highest-priority category, low-income and low-performing.

Forty-two percent of families who applied were in the lowest-priority group, not low-performing or low-income.

"I was very surprised when I saw these two numbers line up that way," Levene said.

School board Chairwoman Jane B. Schuchardt said the number of well-off families applying for transfers for children who are doing well might indicate that demographics, not academics, are inspiring some transfer requests.

"I guess these are just parents who are looking to open-enroll their kids, parents who are looking at putting them in a different environmental setting," Schuchardt said. "It's not because the schools aren't providing them their needs."

School officials said they will make "every effort" to transfer all pupils who applied. The deciding factor, Caplan said, is money.

"The bottom line is, we have to provide transportation for all the students we move," Caplan said.

The legislation requires school systems to put up 15 percent of the Title I funding they receive from the federal government to bus pupils requesting transfers. In Howard, that's nearly $400,000. But officials don't know how much it would cost to relocate the 62 pupils who have applied.

The process is scheduled to be completed by July 29.

Caplan said that because nearly all of Howard's elementary schools are crowded, officials will have to look at enrollments in schools' grade levels and might end up moving some pupils to schools that are over their capacity.

"We have to act in good faith," she said.

Parents were discouraged from indicating which high-performing school they would like their children to be attend, especially because officials had said that they would try to move children within their neighborhood feeder systems and keep children from each school together.

"That would cut back on transportation costs," Caplan said, "so we can move more students who want to be transferred."