More than a month after a county board ruled in their favor, families wanting to transfer their children out of Fillmore schools continue to face unknowns.

The Fillmore Unified School District denied 30 percent of its 2007-08 interdistrict transfer requests, using a decision-making process that the Ventura County Board of Education later called flawed.

The county board announced its position June 8, but Fillmore officials have yet to say whether they will follow it, leaving families waiting to find out where their children will go to school this fall.

"We're in limbo," said Nancy Gallagher, whose daughters were both denied interdistrict transfers this year. "We really can't do anything."

Brynna Gallagher, 11, wants to go to a Ventura independent study school so she can continue to train at her Ventura ballet studio. Her younger sister, Tessa, wants to stay at Santa Clara School, a small public school near Fillmore. Both had received transfer approvals from Fillmore Unified for several years without issue.

Fillmore Unified officials are reviewing the county's written order, which they received a few weeks ago, said Superintendent Jeff Sweeney. Trustees also have met with their attorney twice in closed session about the issue.

The board doesn't have any regularly scheduled meetings in July and has decided to wait until its August meeting to make a final decision about its next step.

"We are in a holding pattern," Sweeney said. "We don't want to make a hasty decision."

At a May hearing, the county board voted to uphold Fillmore Unified's transfer rejections, including the Gallaghers'. Trustees cited their attorney's position that Fillmore Unified had a legal right to deny the transfers.

Last month, however, that attorney told parents he had been wrong.

State law allows Fillmore and other districts with fewer than 50,000 students to limit transfers to 3 percent of overall enrollment, which Fillmore adopted in 2006 and used as a basis for its denials.

But last month, Don Hurley, the county board attorney, said the limit should not have applied to multiyear interdistrict transfers involving childcare issues, parents who work for other school districts, or students already attending other districts under previously granted transfers.

As an appellate body, the county board said it could not reconsider the appeals it had already heard in May, such as the Gallaghers', but it directed Fillmore to review its interdistrict transfer requests in line with its new ruling.

The county board also sustained four families' appeals it considered at the June 8 meeting, specifically asking Fillmore to review those cases and allow the students to transfer out of the district if they fell within one of the exempted categories.

Fillmore granted 114 of 169 transfer requests for the 2007-08 school year. The district decided to limit the number this year as a new team of administrators took over.

The 3,800-student district was in its third year of declining enrollment, Sweeney said, and state funding is based on the number of students. He said the district has to balance parental rights against what's best overall for Fillmore students.