Schools to redraw attendance lines, with several goals

6/9/09

Khalila Perrin

Suburban News

* The aims include reducing the exodus to charter schools and addressing some areas with overcrowding, while maintaining neighborhood schools as well as promoting school choice.

As the school year draws to a close, Columbus City Schools’ administration has its eye on redrawing the district’s attendance boundaries.

That means recruiting is already under way for a committee to help with redistricting plans to be developed during the next five months, Superintendent Gene Harris told Columbus Board of Education last week.

Harris said she’ll call upon residents, parents, school staff, and members of the district’s Audit and Accountability and Neighborhood School Development Partnership committees to take part.

The committee will begin meeting monthly in June.

Redistricting will change where some students attend school as early as fall 2010, though officials aren’t sure whether they’ll phase in the changes, Harris said.

Currently all students in grades K-12 are assigned to a school based on their address. But students also have the option to participate in a lottery for a chance to attend a school other than their assignment.

With four new theme-based schools on the horizon and issues of declining enrollment — as well as the administration’s promise to close and consolidate at least six schools during the next four years — redistricting will have to more than just a numbers game, said Harris.

“What we’ve done before is that we just addressed closing schools based on a pure enrollment kind of focus,” she said.

Now the focus has to be on everything — from reassignments to academic planning to still pushing for the 90 percent graduation rate for the class of 2012.

“We’re going to have to rearrange our students and make sure that we’ve got the space to be able to accommodate the kind of programming we know is important,” Harris said.

While the district projects 1,500 students will leave the district each year during the next several years, overcrowding is still an issue in some areas.

Districtwide, some 106 modular classroom facilities are being used.

A part of the new committee’s commission will be to redistrict in a way that stems the tide.

“Just about every year I’ve … explained that we have to make an adjustment in boundaries because of some of the overcrowding,” Harris said.

“So we want to look at that and see if we can relieve some of that overcrowding.”

Committee members also must devise ways to strengthen the district’s neighborhood school feeder patterns, while also maintaining school choice.

That seemed like conflicting directions to school board Vice President Stephanie Groce, she told Harris during the board’s June 2 meeting.

“How are we prepared to deal with that?” Groce asked Harris.

Harris is an advocate for both school choice and strong neighborhood schools, she said.

“I really want our community … to have the best of both worlds.”

That means parents should have “great” neighborhood schools and school lottery opportunities, if they know of a district school with “a particular curricular focus” that meets their child’s needs.

The new committee will meet monthly for the next five months to map out a redistricting plan.

Residents will be able review and comment on the committee’s proposals at community meetings in November.

The Board of Education aims to vote on the recommendations in December 2009.

“We’re going to have to rearrange our students, and make sure that we’ve got the space to be able to accommodate the kind of programming we know is important.”

–Gene Harris