#school boundaries

[charniceamilton-blog]

A week before the first day of school, Mayor Vincent Gray adopted new school boundaries for the 2015-2016 school year.

[notdistrictdialogue]

Sioux Falls won't use new school boundaries to mix rich and poor kids

About a month ago, the Sioux Falls School Board was shown the administration’s priorities for redrawing school attendance boundary lines, made necessary by the coming Longfellow/Mark Twain consolidation, Jefferson closure and new George McGovern MS.

There are five priorities. I was surprised, perhaps, that balancing the socioeconomic makeup of the schools was not one of them. I figured the administration would try to get a mix of rich and poor kids and some racial diversity wherever possible.

“No, and it never has been,” Superintendent Pam Homan told me.

She said that would conflict with their fourth priority, which is to keep natural borders, such as major roadways, as school boundaries. “We look at it as neighborhood cohorts.”

She added later that typically, a school district might look at each school’s demographics if it’s reconfiguring boundaries for the entire school district. But what the school board is doing this fall is a more limited redraw, in the central and west part of the district and only for elementary and middle school boundaries.

The priorities:

1.       Quality Education for All Students – ensure equitable space for programs in district schools; maintain geographically balanced placement of special ed programs.

2.      Student Safety/Well Being – provide safe walking routes to school throughout the district; strive to ensure equity in the maximum amount of time similarly-situated students must spend on a bus.

3.      Budget Considerations – economize transportation costs by not busing students out of natural walk areas wherever possible; reassign student attendance areas in order to maintain maximum cost efficiency in the district’s funds.*

4.      Natural Borders as School Boundary Lines – keep contiguous neighborhoods together wherever possible; ensure that students will move into middle and high schools with their neighborhood classmates wherever possible.

5.      Accommodate Growth and Change – analyze 5-year city growth patterns to attempt to preserve newly drawn boundaries for a minimum of five years; set attendance areas according to anticipated growth or aging out of neighborhoods.

* Yes, they really write like that.

Here's a thing our Dorene Weinstein wrote for Sunday's paper on the connections people make with their schools.

Public input sessions on the planned boundary changes begin Nov. 12.

- Josh Verges, guest post