Last night, the Board met to bring our new Superintendent up to speed specifically on our thoughts regarding the boundary discussion that has been going on for a year or so(note that Dr. Baker doesn’t actually officially start until August 1st, but he’s clearly dived into a few things already). We agreed to the scope of the decisions that need to be made and clarified the next steps. This can be broken up into three distinct efforts:
- Making a boundary change in time for next year’s kindergarten enrollment: The Superintendent and his staff will analyze the current demographic data that we have, determine if they need more information, and begin to do the analysis on what would happen to each school depending on different boundary changes. The goal would be to have some preliminary proposals by the end of October, which then can be socialized with the community over the following couple of months…all within time for Kindergarten enrollment next Spring.
- Creating a longer-term capacity management plan: Understanding the the immediate boundary change will likely not solve the medium to longer-term problem of capacity at our schools, we need to develop a more comprehensive capacity management plan. This may include many different ideas such as new construction (which could require construction bonds), re-configuring schools, and potentially other changes in boundaries and/or enrollment procedures. However, this would be a process that would take a bit longer to do — perhaps 18 months or so — and involve a fair bit of community involvement. The expectation is that by this Fall, the administration will propose a timetable and plan for creating this plan.
- Fixes to the registration process itself: Parents who attended the kindergarten registration process understood that this is less than an ideal system. The Superintendent and his staff will work on fixes — which may be implemented over a couple of years — to streamline both the actual process of registration but also the communication to parents around the process, the potential waitlists, etc.
We all agreed that we need excellent communication to the community at every step, and also we need to make it clear that just making this boundary change does NOT solve the problem. It should hopefully mimimize waiting lists in the next couple of years, but there are longer-term capacity decisions that need to be made.
