School Board teeing up overhaul of its boundary-adjustment policies
Arlington School Board members in mid-November will consider a major overhaul to how the school system tackles boundary adjustments.
If adopted, school leaders will start looking at boundaries on a two-year cycle rather than the current five years, and will apply a new set of criteria to guide how to make them.
A public hearing and potential adoption of policy changes is slated for Thursday, Nov. 14.
The staff proposal , which already has been through two rounds of public comment, in some ways represents a sea change.
"There's actually very little of the existing language kept — most of this is new," said Steven Marku, the school system's director of policy and legislative affairs.
He briefed School Board members and took questions on Tuesday (Oct. 29).
Marku said the draft policy does not envision a never-ending serious of boundary tweaks.
"It is not anticipated there will be boundary changes every two years. We just want to review it every two years," he said.
Under the proposal, adjustments in boundaries typically would be limited to schools that are either 15% over or 15% under capacity. Currently, only a handful of county schools qualify.
Four criteria are being proposed to guide decision-making on future boundary adjustments. In descending order of importance and as described by the school system, they are:
"As we make our decisions, these are the factors we apply and the relative weights we think are important," School Board Chair Mary Kadera said.
Existing boundary-adjustment policy has six criteria and does not rank them by priority. That has led to communities being able to nitpick proposed boundary changes in an effort to get the end result they desire.
For decades, Arlington boundary-change efforts have drawn emotional responses from parents. Some work behind the scenes to get a specific outcome — even if, potentially, the final result is not necessarily best for the overall community.
Having tiered criteria in place should help the process by laying out ground rules for decision-making, Board member Bethany Sutton said. She noted "past issues with people feeling they hadn't been heard."
The proposal also stipulates that no student living in the same home would be required to switch schools more than once at each of the three school levels: elementary, middle and high school.
Marku said that while that language means a student might have to make up to three switches within those levels over the course of 13 years of schooling, such a scenario was "very unlikely."
