Follow-up: Voluntary transfers

At our last board meeting, I moved to prohibit next year’s ninth-graders from transferring into Liberty High from outside Liberty’s attendance area, and the motion passed. Here are my reasons for the motion:

First, ninth-grade transfers will worsen the projected overcrowding at Liberty. When Liberty opens, it will have a capacity of 1000 seats, and our enrollment projections show that, even without any voluntary transfers, its enrollment will be over 1000 as of 2019-20:

By contrast, Liberty in its first two years (2017-18 and 2018-19) is likely to be underfilled, because students from the classes of 2018 and 2019 are allowed to finish up at West High if they choose to.

As a result, I was not against allowing juniors and seniors to transfer into Liberty next year, since they will help fill the building in its initial years and will be gone before the building becomes overcrowded. But I had concerns about allowing freshmen and sophomores to transfer in next year, because they will still be there when the enrollment exceeds the building’s capacity. By the time next year’s freshmen graduate, Liberty is projected to be already 12% over capacity (while we anticipate plenty of space available at West High). Any transfers we allow will simply make that number worse.

Second, the board needs to consider this issue in light of its decision assign the Kirkwood area to the Liberty High zone. The board chose to require students in the Kirkwood area, which has a relatively high proportion of students from low-income households, to attend Liberty, in order to promote socioeconomic balance among the secondary schools. I voted against that decision, because I was concerned that Kirkwood-area students would be made worse off by having to attend schools that are farther away and more difficult to get to and from. But now that they’re assigned to Liberty, the least we can do is not overcrowd the building.

Moreover, there is a fairness issue. Many Kirkwood-area students are effectively required to attend Liberty whether they want to or not. Freshman and sophomores are ineligible to transfer out of Liberty in 2017-18, and even if transfers were available, students must provide their own transportation, which lower-income families are less likely to have the means to do. Again, the board majority justified the Kirkwood decision on the grounds that it would promote socioeconomic balance and reduce overcrowding. So how could the board then allow better-off families—those with the means to provide their own transportation—to transfer into Liberty, even when it would undermine socioeconomic balance and worsen overcrowding? If we’re willing to say “no” to low-income families, we need to be willing to say “no” to better-off families too.

At the meeting, I could not get a clear sense of how the administration planned to handle transfer requests into Liberty, so I moved to close Liberty High to transfers from ninth graders (except for those who meet hardship criteria) next year. The motion passed, 4-3. (Board members Hemingway, Roesler, Roetlin, and I voted yes; Directors DeLoach, Kirschling, and Lynch voted no.)

Liberty is slated to receive a 500-seat addition as of 2022-23 (a year after next year’s freshmen will graduate). As we get closer to that date, become more certain of the funding for the addition, and have a better sense of how much growth to expect in the Liberty zone, it will make sense for the board to revisit the transfer issue.

Previous posts here.

Liberty High curricular and extra-curricular offerings

New information about the curricular and extra-curricular offerings at Liberty High School when it opens next year is here and here.

Board chooses inequitable voluntary transfer plan that will create overcrowding

Two weeks ago, the school board majority voted to take two high-poverty areas and assign them to more distant secondary schools for the sake of achieving socioeconomic balance. Last night, that same majority supported liberally giving school choice throughout the district to families who have the means to provide their own transportation, regardless of its effect on socioeconomic balance.

The board also consciously chose to allow voluntary transfers into secondary schools even when the district knows that those transfers will worsen overcrowding in those buildings.

The plan that the board supported last night is outlined in this administrative proposal. The plan allows secondary-school transfers as long as they won’t push the receiving school’s enrollment over 95% of its future capacity, regardless of whether they overcrowd the building in the here and now. It allows transfers only if they don’t make enrollment at the departed-from school drop below a certain percentage of its capacity. Freshmen and sophomores will ordinarily not be allowed to transfer out of Liberty High in its opening year.

The plan would give the administration the discretion to permit exceptions to those rules on a case-by-case basis to students who could demonstrate that the boundary changes create a “hardship” for them. The board decided not (at least at this time) to adopt any criteria for what would count as such a hardship. (The longstanding policy of allowing health, safety, and security hardship transfers will continue.) Hardship transfers will not come with a bus, though, so they’ll do little good for anyone whose hardship is the transportation barriers created by the new boundaries.

In my view, setting the limit based on future capacity, rather than present capacity, makes no sense. For example, we have every reason to think that Liberty High’s enrollment will be well over its capacity by 2019-20. (This chart shows overcrowding just by projecting forward the number of students currently in the younger grades, and it does not account for likely growth in the North Corridor.) So if we allow freshmen and sophomores to transfer in to Liberty in 2017, we know that those students will put the building even further over capacity in 2019. But under the administrative plan, those transfers will be allowed, on the grounds that Liberty will someday have more seats—that is, in 2022, long after those particular students have graduated.

Similarly, the plan treats City High’s capacity as higher than it will actually be until it gets its addition five years from now. After months of trading arguments about how the boundary plan will affect overcrowding, the board seems to have decided that overcrowding isn’t so bad after all—at least when it accommodates families with means.

The plan makes a hash of the board’s rationale for its secondary boundary decision. The district will have succeeded in effectively taking school choice away from families who don’t have the means to get their kids to and from their preferred school, while providing it to everyone else. If you’re a well-off Manville or Shimek family who wants to transfer out of City and into Liberty—making the socioeconomic disparity between the schools worse—we’re fine with that. If you’re a well-off Wickham family who wants to transfer out of West into Liberty—making the socioeconomic disparity worse—we’re fine with that. But if you’re poor and have no choice but to rely on the school bus, you have to go to the more distant school, regardless of your judgment about what’s best for your child. And, by the way, if that school is Liberty, we hope you enjoy the overcrowding!

It’s harder and harder to see the board’s decisions as being driven by concern for kids from low-income families. I don’t know how we can look any Kirkwood or Alexander parent in the eye after these choices.

Board agenda for Tuesday, September 27

At this week’s board meeting, we’ll discuss (and hopefully settle) the question of how the district should handle voluntary transfers from one ICCSD school to another. Info here. Posts here and here.

We’ll also hear a presentation on the planned renovation of Longfellow Elementary, a report on the ACT scores of district students, and updates on (1) how the cuts to discretionary have affected traffic at drop-off and pick-up times at affected schools, and on other transportation issues, and (2) how the district is responding in the short term to the lack of air conditioning at some of our schools. (In the longer term, the district’s facilities master plan includes plans to air-condition all district schools.)

This is also our annual organizational meeting, so we’ll elect officers, appoint committee members, etc.

The full agenda is here; please chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

Voluntary transfers and fairness

The board has a choice between two approaches to voluntary transfers. One possibility is to write specific rules that make it clear who is entitled to an exception to our usual transfer rules. The other is to allow the administration to decide on a case-by-case basis whether a student’s circumstances rise to the level of a “hardship” that merits special treatment.

One reason I’m in favor of the first approach is that I doubt it’s possible to have a case-by-case approach without generating fairness issues. I don’t want to get into the position where, on the one hand, we’re telling a student from the Alexander neighborhood (in southern Iowa City) that it’s not a hardship to attend Northwest Junior High in Coralville, but we’re simultaneously giving a transfer to a student from another area who really wants to attend Liberty because it’s closer, or because all of his friends go there, or because he’s got his heart set on being on one of the sports teams.

Fairness problems like that seem inevitable under a discretionary case-by-case system. Parents who want transfers for their kids will have an incentive to generate “hardship” arguments, and no matter what the district has done with other kids, there will always be a way to say that this next student’s circumstances are somehow different—and what will really end up making the difference is which kids have the parents who are better able to advocate.

If we think there are other categories that merit special treatment—even if it’s “the team needs me!”—let’s write them down so the process is transparent, consistent, and fair.

That’s why I keep working at trying to write specific rules, even if it gets a little complicated. I’ve now boiled that effort down to the following, which I’ll offer at our next board meeting. It’s an attempt to list some rules that I think we might be able to get consensus on, though we could always add or subtract as we discuss it. (For the explanations behind some of these rules, see this post.) Let me know what you think in the comments.

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The board should direct the administration to incorporate the following rules into our voluntary transfer policy:

Students may apply for voluntary transfer into an ICCSD school other than their assigned school.

Capacity rules. As the secondary students, the district will approve the transfer only if it appears likely that there will be capacity available at the receiving school for as long as the student is entitled to remain there. As to elementary students, the district will approve the transfer only if it appears likely that there will be capacity available at the student’s particular grade level for as long as the student is entitled to remain there.

If there are more transfer applications than there are spots available, the district will award transfers by lottery, except it will give first priority to students who finished their previous year at the receiving school, and second priority to students who will have a sibling attending the receiving school in the year of the transfer.

Transportation. The district will not provide transportation to students on voluntary transfers, except as law or other district policy requires.

Newly opening schools. Except as provided in any of the sections below, students who are redistricted into a newly opening school may not voluntarily transfer out of that school during its first year.

Capstone rules. Juniors and seniors will be entitled to voluntary transfer, not subject to the capacity rules, into any high school at which they completed their previous year. This rule will apply to sophomore as well, unless they have been redistricted into a newly opening high school.

Eighth graders will be entitled to voluntary transfer, not subject to the capacity rules, into any junior high where they finished their seventh grade year.

Sixth graders will be entitled to voluntary transfer, not subject to the capacity rules, into any elementary school where they finished their fifth grade year.

North Lincoln. Students from the “North Lincoln” area who voluntarily transferred into South East Junior High no later than the 2016-17 school year will be entitled to voluntary transfers, not subject to the capacity rules, enabling them to remain on the SEJH-City path through high school graduation.

North Lincoln students who are sophomores in 2017-18 will not be subject to the newly opening schools rule.

Van Allen. Students from the small portion of Van Allen that will become part of Wickham in 2019-20 will be entitled to voluntary transfers, not subject to the capacity rules, enabling them to be on the NCJH/Liberty path through high school graduation, as long as they complete their sixth grade year at Van Allen no later than the 2019-20 school year.

Eighth and ninth graders formerly in City High zone. Students who are in eighth or ninth grade in 2017-18 will be entitled to transfer voluntarily onto the SEJH/City path, not subject to capacity rules.

Multiple rezonings. An elementary school student will be entitled to voluntary transfer, not subject to the capacity rules, to remain at the school he or she was assigned to in the previous year if that student has already changed elementary schools at least once because of a change in school zone boundaries. Such a student will be entitled to renew that transfer through sixth grade, not subject to the capacity rules.

Siblings. A student will be entitled to transfer onto a secondary path, not subject to the capacity rules, if he or she has an older sibling who will be on that secondary path during the year of the transfer and if he or she is no more than three years behind that older sibling. This rule is limited to students who start seventh grade no later than 2017-18.

Hardship. Students will be entitled to voluntary transfer, not subject to the capacity rules, if the district determines that a transfer is necessary for health, safety, or security reasons. The district will apply the same standard to these requests as it does to requests for open enrollment out of the district for cause.

Voluntary transfers, continued

Last week, the board started discussing what exceptions we should make (if any) to our usual voluntary transfer rules as we transition to new boundaries and the opening of a new high school. I think it’s important to lay out a clear set of rules, so the administration will know who is and who isn’t subject to an exception. Since there are conflicting value judgments involved in deciding where to draw the lines, I think it makes sense for the board to decide the rules.

Some board members seemed doubtful that we could anticipate in advance all of the situations that might merit special treatment. I think it can be done, and I think it’s better to have clear rules than to rely on a discretionary case-by-case approach. But this is definitely an enterprise where multiple heads are better than one, so I’m looking for reader input here.

If you’re not directly affected by this issue (and maybe even if you are!), you will find this a long, boring discussion. But if you have any thoughts about what follows, and especially if you can think of other categories of student that might need to be addressed, please chime in with a comment. I express my own opinion in some places along the way; but sometimes I am just identifying multiple approaches that the board could consider.

I’m linking to the remainder of this discussion, since I had trouble duplicating the formatting here on blogger.

Previous post here.

School board agenda for Tuesday, September 13

Some of the items on this week’s board agenda:

1. The board will discuss (and probably resolve) the issue of secondary boundaries, which has been pending since the process was interrupted by the resignation of board member Tom Yates in May. I’m guessing that there will now be a majority for reinstating the previous board’s secondary boundary plan that would send Kirkwood-area students to Liberty and Alexander-area students to Northwest Junior High and West High. (I don’t support that plan, for reasons I wrote about here, here, here, and here.)

2. We’ll consider two busing appeals from parents who argue that their kids should receive a bus to West High because they live just beyond the three-mile mark.

3. We’ll hear an update on the district’s response to the State Department of Education’s audit of our special education practices. Info here.

4. At the work session after the meeting, we’ll discuss our request to our demographer to get updated enrollment projections. Info here.

5. We’ll discuss a proposed process to get community input on possible changes to the district’s facilities master plan. Editorial comment: I have a lot of doubts about the ability of our ThoughtExchange platform to provide a representative sample of community sentiment, and I wish it did not advertise itself in that way. (See this post.) But what I’m most interested in is hearing all the arguments and counterarguments on any proposed changes, and ThoughtExchange is one way of gathering those, as are emails, community comment at board meetings, etc.

6. We’ll discuss our voluntary transfer process and whether we should change it or make any exceptions to it as we transition to new boundaries and the opening of a new high school. Long, boring post on this topic here.

7. We’ll review a proposed timeline for preparing for a bond proposal to appear on the September 2017 school board election ballot, to fund projects in the district’s facilities master plan.

8. We’ll discuss the district’s weighted resource allocation model, under which schools that have higher rates of free-and-reduced-price lunch (FRL) (which is the district’s proxy for low-income status) receive additional resources. The district has already begun phasing in this model—by, for example, trying to tilt teacher allocation toward high-FRL elementary schools. I asked for some further discussion of just how this model would function at the secondary school level.

9. We’ll get a quarterly report on the board’s strategic goal to “annually improve the educational experiences for all children through culturally inclusive and responsive school environments and classroom instruction, as measured by various student assessments including the Biennial Youth Survey, with a focus on equitable outcomes for students in protected classes.”

All that and more. The full agendas are here and here; chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

Voluntary transfers and transition rules

UPDATE 9/18/16The board made some headway discussing this issue at last week’s work session. Follow-up discussion here.

One of the topics the board will be discussing in this week’s work session is the district’s voluntary transfer process. Earlier this year, I proposed that the board consider making some changes and clarifications to that process as we transition to new boundaries and to the opening of Liberty High. This post is to update and summarize that proposal and ask readers for input. (Warning: prepare for a long post.)

A response to Chris Lynch’s guest opinion

My fellow board member Chris Lynch has a guest opinion in today’s Press-Citizen on the subject of secondary boundaries. As anyone who reads this blog knows, this is a topic that the board is divided on. Disagreement among the board members can be a healthy thing, especially if it means that people get to hear both arguments and counterarguments on important issues. In that spirit, here’s my take on the arguments Director Lynch raises in his article.

• The first thing I noticed about the article is that it says nothing about the primary objection raised to Director Lynch’s proposal: the busing of kids from two of our most high-poverty neighborhoods, Kirkwood and Alexander, to more distant schools for the sake of pursuing greater socioeconomic parity at the high schools. The article does not even try to persuade the reader that the plan’s benefits outweigh its burdens for Kirkwood and Alexander families. I take the article to be implying that whatever burdens those families have to bear are justified by the other benefits of the proposal, but I would have liked to hear the main counterargument to the proposal more explicitly addressed.

• Much of the article is arguing with a straw man: Director Lynch compares his favored proposal with a plan that would assign both Kirkwood and Alexander to West High. But in fact, neither side of this debate wants to leave both Kirkwood and Alexander assigned to West. The real alternative proposal is to assign Kirkwood to West and all or most of Alexander to City High. As a result, many of Director Lynch’s arguments falter. For example, he argues that his proposal—to remove Kirkwood from West—will keep West from becoming overcrowded, but the alternative proposal—removing Alexander from West—will also keep it from becoming overcrowded. Basically, West with Alexander looks a lot like West with Kirkwood, so it’s hard to distinguish the two proposals based on their effect on West.

• Director Lynch’s main argument is that his proposal is the only way to prevent “programming inequity” at the high schools. I’m not surprised at this focus. Despite all the talk about the need for diversity, much of this debate has been driven by a desire for uniformity in course offerings at the three high schools—which explains why the focus on “balance” has been exclusively at the secondary level, even though the socioeconomic disparities at the elementary level are far larger. (Many of the people arguing against having fifteen- or twenty-point FRL (rate of free- and reduced-price lunch) differences at the high schools were supportive of the board’s adoption of elementary boundaries that had FRL differences of over seventy percentage points.)
  
  What are the programming differences that will result if we keep Kirkwood and Alexander at their nearest high schools? Director Lynch does not say. He says only that “Liberty will not have programming equity with City/West due to low/lower student enrollment.” But it has always been the plan for Liberty to start with lower enrollment, because its initial capacity will be lower. (It will be a 1000-seat school until 2022.) The district’s curricular goal for Liberty is to have at least 200 kids per class, with the understanding that juniors and seniors will not be required to attend in its initial year. On the high end, it would be unwise to have more than about 250 kids per class, since that would push the building over capacity as soon as there are four full classes there. Based on what we know about how many students are in the pipeline, keeping Kirkwood at West is the plan that puts Liberty at between 200 and 250 students per class in its initial years—thus meeting its curricular goals while avoiding overcrowding.
  
  Director Lynch’s proposal, on the other hand, would result in enrollment at Liberty being significantly over capacity by 2019 (the first year it will have four full classes), even without considering likely population growth in the North Corridor. And the overcrowding would get much worse before Liberty gets its addition (scheduled for 2022).

• Director Lynch asserts that unless his proposal is adopted, “The barriers to learning will be 2-4 times higher at City/West than Liberty.” I had to stop and read that sentence multiple times, since at first I had no idea what it meant. I’m assuming that the article is equating the rate of free- and reduced-price lunch or English language instruction with a school having “higher barriers to learning.” This strikes me as an odd way to talk about the presence of poor kids or second-language English speakers in our schools. It is also inherently alarmist language; “4 times higher” may mean that one high school would have 8% of its kids in English-language instruction while another high school would have 2%—but it sounds scarier to say that “barriers to learning will be four times higher” at the former.
  
  Certainly some kids do face greater barriers, but the article avoids any discussion of how those kids will be better off if they are bused to different schools. That would require a discussion of whether the likely FRL rate at any school is high enough to raise educational red flags, and whether the benefit of moving kids to a different, more distant school will outweigh the burdens. The article doesn’t attempt to make those arguments.

• Director Lynch suggests that only under his proposal can a bond be passed that will fund the remaining projects in the district’s facilities plan. It’s true that no one is under any obligation to vote for a bond, and some people may choose to express their unhappiness with the board’s policies by voting “no” on any bond. But this kind of argument is circular: everyone likes to think that their plan is the one the community likes best. Director Lynch says that the community and the board “collectively spent thousands of hours” developing his proposal, but in fact there was a great deal of opposition to busing-for-balance at the district’s listening posts. What’s especially noticeable about the argument on bond passage, though, is the absence of any acknowledgement that Kirkwood and Alexander residents will also play a role in whether a bond passes. In the discussion of bond passage, those voters don’t seem to exist.

• Director Lynch argues that “anything that looks like segregation” has “no place in the Iowa City Community School District.” There is no doubt that the housing patterns that make it harder to diversify some of our schools are the result of a history of discrimination. Whether our high schools need to have nearly equal socioeconomic profiles to avoid “looking like segregation,” however, is another question, especially if that goal requires treating low-income families worse than other families, by putting greater burdens on them and by being more willing to disregard their input. How best to improve the lives of kids from low-income families is a hard question that can’t be reduced to simply equalizing numbers—as Director Lynch has essentially acknowledged by supporting elementary boundaries that have enormous disparities in socioeconomic and racial diversity and that look much more like segregation than anything proposed at the high school level.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want socioeconomic balance at the secondary schools. Unfortunately, though, that balance cannot be achieved—at least not through traditional attendance zones—without busing hundreds of kids from low-income families every year to more distant schools. I remain unconvinced that those kids will be made better off through that kind of plan, and I do not see the likely socioeconomic differences at the high schools as being large enough to justify burdening those kids in that way.

Related posts here, here, and here.

Update on Liberty High enrollment projections

As I wrote about here, the board has been debating whether to assign the Kirkwood Elementary area to the Liberty High zone or the West High zone. The board recently voted 4-3 to assign Kirkwood to West High. One question that arose was what effect that assignment would have on enrollment at Liberty. Some were concerned that without Kirkwood, Liberty would not have the two hundred kids per class that the district saw as its initial goal. Others (including me) were concerned that sending Kirkwood to Liberty would cause Liberty’s enrollment to exceed its capacity as early as 2019, the first year it will have four full classes in the building.

(During Liberty’s first year of operation, the district is allowing juniors and seniors in the Liberty zone the option of staying at their previous high school; the same is true for seniors during Liberty’s second year. So it will not have four full classes until its third year, which is 2019-20.)

Projecting the enrollment at Liberty is not a straightforward task. The district’s most recent set of enrollment projections is of limited usefulness, since it makes projections based on our old set of elementary boundaries, which will not be the boundaries when Liberty opens. So the board asked the administration to make projections for Liberty based simply on moving forward the current cohorts of kids who are in the Liberty zone. For example, the kids who will be Liberty freshman in 2019 are this past year’s fifth-graders, so we can simply count the outgoing fifth-graders in Liberty’s zone and use that as an estimate of the 2019 freshman class.

Notice that that kind of projection is incomplete and inherently conservative, because it does not account for the expected population growth in the North Corridor. It also does not account for voluntary transfers into the Liberty zone, which could boost its attendance in the early years. (Under our current rules, voluntary transfers are not permitted once a building’s enrollment exceeds its capacity.) It also does not account for the possible decrease in open enrollment out to other districts (such as Clear Creek Amana) once Liberty is open.

This weekend, the administration provided those projections. The first one shows Liberty without Kirkwood included (click to enlarge):

The next one shows Liberty if Kirkwood is included (click to enlarge):

The projections show that Liberty will meet and exceed its goal of having two hundred kids per class as soon as it opens, even without Kirkwood being assigned there. (Any Liberty projection, however, is subject to the fact that there is no way to predict the junior and senior class enrollment in Liberty’s first year, or the senior class enrollment in its second year, because students in those years have the option of remaining at their previous school.)

The projections also show that if Kirkwood is assigned to Liberty, Liberty will be over capacity as soon as it has four full classes (in 2019). (Liberty's initial capacity will be 1000 students.) By 2021-22, the year before Liberty gets its 500-seat addition, the school would be at least 21% over capacity if Kirkwood is assigned there, plus whatever additional enrollment is attributable to population growth in the Corridor.

That said, the projected overcrowding is not as bad as I had anticipated in my previous post. My fellow board member Brian Kirschling argued that I had not accounted for the fact that enrollment in the North Corridor schools is currently disproportionately in the early grades, and you can definitely see that effect in these projections. Nonetheless, Kirkwood does put Liberty over capacity for three of its first five years—and again, these are conservative estimates.

The projections also give some idea of how much Liberty’s free-and-reduced-price lunch (FRL) rate would go up if Kirkwood is assigned there. (FRL is the district’s proxy for low-income status.) FRL status is hard to project into the future because it can vary with the economy and with housing patterns, and because it can change from year to year even as to any particular student, but it’s safe to say that when Liberty opens, its FRL would be closer to the district average, though still probably several percentage points below that of City High, if Kirkwood is assigned there.

Do these projections mean that Kirkwood cannot possibly be assigned to Liberty? No. The facilities master plan has always assumed that we can’t eliminate overcrowding overnight and that short-term overcrowding is a necessary evil—though it may be particularly hard to justify overcrowding when capacity is available elsewhere. What the projections do highlight is a tension between the goal of FRL balance and the goal of bringing enrollment in line with capacity. I continue to think that the main argument against assigning Kirkwood to Liberty is that we shouldn’t burden kids from low-income households with additional transportation barriers, as I wrote about here. But the capacity issue at Liberty is one more factor tilting against assigning Kirkwood there.

Update, Thursday, May 12

As I mentioned in my last post, there were some preliminary estimates of the free and reduced-lunch (FRL) that would result from assigning both Kirkwood and Alexander elementaries to West High. This has led to some erroneous information finding its way around. The district has now posted more finalized calculations of those rates. They show a 36% FRL rate at City High, a 34% rate at West High, and a 20% rate at Liberty High, under the enrollment we have today in the three secondary zones that have been drawn, assuming that both Kirkwood and Alexander are assigned to West.

There will be disagreement about whether that range of numbers is acceptable, and the updated information raises some legitimate concerns about capacity usage. My own view is that we still need to make additional changes to the secondary boundary plan.

Again, the board is still working through this issue and has scheduled a work session to continue its discussion of it. Under state law, we simply can’t discuss these issues as a group except in our scheduled board meetings and work sessions. As a result, the process does not always proceed as quickly and linearly as we would all like. On a difficult and controversial issue, that can understandably make people anxious, but it’s just part of the process that has to occur to reach a conclusion.

The board members have some disagreement about how to weigh the value of parity in the FRL rates against the concrete realities of assigning high-poverty areas to schools that are farther away and harder to get to, as well as about other aspects of the issue. (See this post.) But I don’t doubt that all of my fellow board members—including those I disagree with—are trying to reach an outcome that is best for the district’s kids and especially for the kids who need the most help.

Secondary boundaries

One of the issues that the school board is discussing at its meetings is whether to stick with the secondary feeder plan that the previous board approved last May. It’s a big topic that’s hard to cover comprehensively in one blog post, but I wanted to post some of my thoughts about it here so people would have some idea of where I’m coming from on it.

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The district is opening a new high school, Liberty High, in 2017, so the board has to establish that school’s attendance area, which will have to be drawn from the attendance areas of City High and/or West High. Rather than draw actual secondary boundaries, the previous board settled on a “feeder plan,” identifying which elementary schools would go to which secondary schools. The idea was that the next board would then finalize the elementary boundaries, but the feeder plan itself would remain unchanged.

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The feeder plan that the previous board adopted put a high value on “balance,” which is shorthand for minimizing disparities in the precentage of kids at each school who are from low-income households, are receiving special education services, or are in the English-language-learner program. To pursue that goal, the plan has to bus kids from some elementary schools to junior highs and high schools that are relatively far from their homes, when closer alternatives exist. Specifically:

• Kids in the Alexander area in the southeasternmost part of Iowa City would be bused to Northwest Junior High in Coralville, which is as much as seven miles away for some of them, instead of going to Southeast Junior High, which is well under two miles away for many of them. They would also go to West High instead of City High, even though City is significantly closer for most of them.

• Kids in the Kirkwood area in Coralville would be assigned to Liberty High (about five miles away) instead of West High (about three-and-a-half miles away and accessible via public transportation). They would also be assigned to North Central Junior High (about three miles away) instead of North West Junior High, which is literally right next door to Kirkwood Elementary. Kirkwood-area students would be given the option of attending North West for junior high, but they would be the only students there who would then go on to Liberty High rather than West.

• Wickham-area students would attend North West Junior High and West High, rather than North Central Junior High and Liberty High, even though the latter are closer than the former, in some cases significantly so.

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When the board voted to adopt the current feeder plan, the administration’s estimates showed a very close FRL percentage at each of the three high schools—31%, 28%, and 29% at City, West, and Liberty, respectively—but those estimates gave a misimpression of what the actual rates would be, because part of the board’s plan was to carve out an area from City and West’s territory that would go to the planned Grant Elementary in the North Corridor, and thus would eventually go on to Liberty High. The site for Grant is in the current Wickham attendance area, which means some portion of Wickham (which the estimates showed going to West High) would naturally become part of Grant and go to Liberty. It also seems very likely that all or part of the “North Lincoln” area (which the estimates showed going to City) will be assigned to Liberty, either because it will become part of Grant, or because it will stay at Lincoln but be assigned to Liberty anyway.

Wickham and Lincoln are both very low-FRL areas, so sending portions of them to Liberty changes the FRL distribution under the current feeder plan considerably. Assuming that about a quarter of Wickham and about half of Lincoln end up at Liberty, my best estimate of the FRL rates in each high school’s zone, if we measured them using this year’s numbers, would be:

City High: 34%

West High: 33%

Liberty High: 20%

As we have discussed the issue this year, an alternative proposal has developed that would keep the Kirkwood area at West High and the Alexander area at City High, but would move other parts of City High’s zone into West and Liberty. (See below.) My best estimate of the resulting FRL rates, if we measured them using this year’s numbers, would be:

City High: 36%

West High: 33%

Liberty High: 15%

(Again, those are ballpark estimates; see below for how I made them. [Update: On May 10, the board adopted new elementary boundaries and began to make changes in the secondary feeder plan. See this post. The resulting FRL rates, under this year's numbers, are 36% at City, 34% at West, and 20% at Liberty. See this post for a follow-up.]

As we debate whether to change our secondary feeder plan, we are choosing between something like the first plan and something like the second one. Although the current feeder plan will not result in as close a socioeconomic balance between the three high schools as it initially seemed, it still provides somewhat more balance than the alternative.

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At least four rationales have been offered for choosing the plan with more socioeconomic balance. The first is that students from lower-income households will perform better academically if they go to schools that do not have high poverty rates. There has been a lot of empirical research on this topic, and I’m pretty easily convinced that, all other things equal, it’s true that low-income kids benefit academically from not being in high-poverty schools.

It doesn’t automatically follow, though, that the current feeder plan is better than the alternative. The FRL differences between the two are not particularly large, and the resulting FRL rates do not appear to be so high as to raise academic red flags. (In fact, according to the state Department of Education, the proficiency rate of City High’s low-SES students is higher than that of West High’s low-SES students, even though West High’s FRL rate is lower.) More importantly, the plan puts concrete transportation burdens on many kids from high-poverty areas, so those burdens have to be weighed against any potential benefit of being in a lower-FRL school.

Every indication is that the great majority of families at Kirkwood and Alexander—which are two of our highest poverty schools—do not think that the plan is what’s best for their kids. For example, our district recently surveyed the parents of Alexander sixth-graders about which junior high they’d rather go to if they know that they’ll end up at West for high school. Twenty out of thirty-three said they wanted their kids to attend Southeast. If they had been given the Southeast-City option, that number probably would have been even higher. That same preference has been reflected in the great majority of comments made by Kirkwood and Alexander parents at board meetings, in emails, and at PTO meetings.

These parents aren’t just expressing an attachment to their current schools out of history or loyalty or familiarity. Those can be real concerns for people, but we can’t possibly draw new districts without asking some families to leave schools they’re fond of. The Kirkwood and Alexander parents, by contrast, are identifying concrete hardships that going to a more distant school imposes on them. Kirkwood parents point out, for example, that there is no public transportation between the Kirkwood area and North Liberty, which will make it hard for kids to get to and from school at times not served by a school bus, especially if they come from one- or no-car households. Alexander families make a similar point, and also point to the sheer quantity of time their kids will have to spend on a bus. “I don’t own a car,” one Kirkwood parent said to me. “If my child is at Liberty and gets sick during the day, how will I get him home?”

I’m certainly not arguing that we should let every neighborhood choose which attendance area they’re in. Of course that’s impossible. I’m also not arguing that no one should ever be asked to make a sacrifice for the greater good; I’m fine with that in many contexts. I’m arguing that we should not make kids in high-poverty areas worse off for the sake of achieving balance, especially since one of the whole reasons we’re pursuing balance in the first place is to benefit those very kids. So it’s important to assess whether the feeder plan makes them worse off or better off. In doing that, my inclination is to give a lot weight to what those families think.

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The second rationale that has been offered for the current feeder plan’s pursuit of (relative) balance is that schools with high FRL rates face a lot of challenges (both academically and behavorially) that make it harder for teachers and staff to give all the kids the attention that they need.

I’m sure there is truth to that. But if that’s the concern, it’s not clear why we should devote our resources to pursuing balance at the secondary level, where the FRLs are relatively low compared to those at our elementary schools. Our district has five elementary schools with FRL rates of over 70%. If there are challenges associated with high-poverty schools, those are the schools most facing the challenges.

Proponents of the secondary feeder plan would probably argue that they would like to see balance at the elementary level too, but that it is not currently politically achievable or sustainable. I think that’s probably true; there would have to be much more broad-based support to bring about the kind of redistricting that would result in balanced FRLs at the all the elementary schools. But what makes the secondary plan any more politically achievable, other than the fact that the burden of it falls mostly on high-poverty areas whose residents are less likely to organize in opposition to it? Again, if Kirkwood and Alexander families were supportive of the feeder plan and thought it would benefit their children, the issue would be much easier to decide.

One way to address some of the challenges teachers and staff face at higher-poverty schools is to devote more resources to those buildings. The current feeder plan, because it spend additional money on school buses, is in tension with that goal. (On that, more below.)

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The third rationale that has been offered for the current feeder plan is that any substantial disparity between the FRL rates at the high schools will lead, over time, to a gradual migration of middle-class and wealthy families toward to the area around Liberty High, at the expense of Iowa City, and particularly the east side. City’s FRL rate may not look so high now, the argument goes, but over time it will climb higher and higher, and all the kids there will be worse off for being in a high-poverty school.

This is an argument I feel a good deal of resistance to, for a number of reasons. First, it invests an awful lot of explanatory power in our boundary decisions; if such a migration does actually occur, it will probably happen for many reasons in addition to the secondary school FRL rate differential. Second, it is essentially unfalsifiable; even though there is no current indication that the FRL rates at City or West will be considerably higher (see note below), this argument just asserts that they will inevitably spiral upward.

Third, though I believe this argument is made with good intentions, it has a tendency to shade into a kind of alarmism about the presence of poor people in Iowa City that is hurtful to those in low-income neighborhoods and ultimately does not help City High. We have been hearing for years now that the east side is on the verge of a “tipping point” because the number of poor families (and therefore the high school FRL rate) has risen. Yet the east side has continued to grow, people continue to choose to live here, new homes (including high-end developments) continue to be built, and City High remains one of the best high schools in the state. There are a lot of reasons to see Iowa City and City High as at least partly success stories, rather than as being on the precipice of a downward spiral.

Fourth, this argument has an all-or-nothing quality to it. Under its logic, any noticeable difference in FRL rates between the high schools will lead to the inevitable decline of one into a high-poverty school. But even the current feeder plan is likely to have about a 14-point FRL difference between high schools, and so could be objected to on the same grounds. To bring all three high schools to a roughly equal FRL rate would take even more extensive redistricting, would require more money spent on buses, and would create even more transportation burdens for kids from low-income families.

Fifth, no matter how carefully it is made, this argument is bound to be experienced as unwelcoming by families in high-FRL areas. I can only imagine what it is like to be a student from the Alexander neighborhood and to hear that if there are too many kids like you at City High, people will no longer choose to move here. Or to be a Kirkwood student and hear that the kids in your area have to attend Liberty High to keep it from becoming too appealing to people.

Finally, there are countervailing concerns about what will happen to the areas around Kirkwood and Alexander under the current plan. More than one Kirkwood parent has told me that if the district goes ahead with the current plan, “Kirkwood’s FRL will be 90%”—because anyone who can afford to move will move. The ongoing development of single-family housing around Alexander has the potential to help bring down Alexander’s FRL rate, but a feeder plan that would send kids to junior high seven miles away is not exactly a selling point. The claims about what will happen to the neighborhoods around those schools are as hard to evaluate as the claims about what will happen on the east side, but they seem at least as worthy of being taken seriously.

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It’s also true that the current feeder plan costs money, and that expense is in competition with funding that could put more resources into our higher-poverty elementary schools. The board was initially told that the feeder plan would require spending about $250,000 annually above what we would spend under a plan that put a higher value on proximity to school. (Kirkwood-area kids, for example, would not need busing to go to North West Junior High, and much of the Alexander area would not need busing to go to City High.) Under the current plan, the board might also choose to run after-school activities buses to areas such as Kirkwood and Alexander, which would make the cost even higher.

It is hard to justify spending money to pursue balance at the secondary level when we have elementary schools with much higher FRL rates that could benefit from those same resources. There is also a good argument that it makes more sense to invest that money in the early grades and in early childhood education, in hopes of putting kids on the best footing at the beginning of their school years. When I recently met with a group of Kirkwood families, none of them thought the current feeder plan was anything other than a burden to them. They were very enthusiastic, though, about the prospect of having more resources (for example, smaller class sizes) at their elementary school.

Will the money “saved” actually be redirected to the schools that most need it? And will it add up to enough to make much difference? Those are fair questions. But the first step toward redirecting resources has to be identifying resources that could be redirected. In my view, there are uses for the money that will be spent on busing that are likely to be more beneficial to kids in higher-need schools. (It is also true that we need to find a way to tilt resource allocation to higher-need schools no matter what we do with secondary boundaries. That issue is on our agenda for tonight’s meeting.)

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A fourth rationale for the current feeder plan is that if the FRL rate is higher at one high school than at another, the curricular offerings will not be the same. There is probably some truth to this, since curricular offerings are at least to some extent driven by demand. However, we’re talking about high schools that will have over a thousand students each. There will still be lots of demand for college prep and Advanced Placement courses, for example, and the high schools will still accommodate that demand.

We have also heard arguments that balance is necessary because lower-FRL schools win more athletic championships and have more successful extracurricular activities, and that the whole school benefits from those successes. I find it hard to give much weight to those arguments. Again, the high schools will still have large and diverse enough student populations to offer lots of athletic and extracurricular opportunities. Athletic championships are nice, but raising the odds of winning titles doesn’t justify the burdens we’d be putting on kids from low-income families under the current feeder plan.

I don’t blame anyone for wishing that our high schools all had similar demographic profiles. But I’m not willing to pursue that outcome no matter what the cost. I guess it is also true that I am just not that alarmed by the prospect that the high school on the east side might look like the east side’s population and seek to serve that population.

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As you can tell, I come to this issue from the perspective of someone living on the east side in a City High household. All of my kids will attend City High; one is already there. I live next door to the school. If I were to argue for the current feeder plan, I would in effect be arguing that we need to have fewer poor (and black) students at my kids’ high school. To make that kind of argument, I’d have to feel very confident that I was doing what’s best for those kids. I just don’t have that confidence.

I realize that my personal perspective should not affect my conclusion about the issue—if I lived in North Liberty, the potential moral hazard would be reversed—but I can’t deny that that perspective informs my thinking about the issue.

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I do think that it’s important to acknowledge that when we talk about FRL rates, we are talking not just about poverty but also about race. Though of course not all black people are poor and vice versa, students receiving free or reduced-price lunch are disproportionately black. There is a strong argument that anything we do with redistricting or with resource allocation has to be accompanied by a sea change in the way that the district engages with black students. Our district has taken steps in a good direction—for example, by developing a comprehensive equity plan—but still has a ways to go.

Not everyone in the affected communities believes that spreading the poor and black population out evenly across our schools is an unmitigated good. There are multiple perspectives on what the district’s approach to engaging with poor and minority students should be. I certainly don’t know all the answers, but I do know that what I hear from the families affected by our decisions does not always match my preconceptions. In general, I think the district needs to be more open to perspectives beyond those coming from within the institution.

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There are also capacity issues underlying the entire secondary boundary discussion. It is unavoidably true that once Liberty is open, some areas currently assigned to City High will have to end up elsewhere. City cannot continue to enroll 44% of our high school students when we have three high school attendance areas. So the hard thing is determining which areas it makes the most sense to re-assign. There, the balance and proximity issues are in direct conflict. The kids who are closest to the other secondaries are in many cases the ones from the most affluent areas, while the higher-poverty areas are often very convenient to Southeast and City.

At the same time, there are issues about how many students we can put at Liberty High, which will have a capacity of only 1000 students until its sixth year of operation, when it will get a 500-seat addition. As I wrote about here, assigning Kirkwood students to Liberty High will put that building significantly over capacity by its third year of operation. Given that there is room for Kirkwood at West High, it is very hard to justify sending them to Liberty. If Kirkwood is kept at West, though, it becomes even harder to justify sending Alexander there.

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What, then, is the alternative to the current feeder plan? This board is not discussing what the previous board identified as Plan 5C, which tried to assign areas purely on the basis of proximity and available capacity. That’s partly because Plan 5C assumed that we would keep a “clean” feeder system, with elementary populations staying together all the way through high school. All things being equal, I think most people would prefer a clean feeder plan, but because of the locations of our schools (and especially our junior highs), having clean feeders greatly complicates the districting process, and is in direct tension with concerns about proximity and capacity. As a result, I do think it makes sense to consider departing from a clean feeder system.

Even the current plan, which took clean feeders as a given, departs from the principle in practice, since Kirkwood students have the option of attending North West Junior High before going on to Liberty (and it is likely that many would choose that option). In theory, we could offer a similar option to Alexander students (though the current plan does not). But most of the feedback I have heard from families in those areas is that they are not happy being put to that kind of choice, because if they choose the more convenient junior high, their kids will be the only kids at the junior high who will end up at a different high school than all of their classmates. If there were a way to send roughly half of a junior high to one high school and the other half to another, splitting the feeder after eighth grades might be more palatable, but there is no scenario I can imagine that would have that result.

Instead, it is possible to consider splitting some feeders after sixth grade. For example, the North Lincoln area could remain at Lincoln Elementary, but after sixth grade, all or part of that area could attend North Central and Liberty. The “North Mann island”—i.e., the Peninsula neighborhood and its surrounding area—could remain at Horace Mann, but then attend North Central and Liberty. The “Twain west side island” could stay at Twain, but then attend North West and West High. In each case, splitting the feeder would take a relatively large group of kids—roughly half of Mann and Lincoln, about a third of Twain—and move them together to a different secondary path. It would also be a way of reducing the City High population without re-assigning kids who are very close to Southeast and City. All of those areas are currently bused to their elementary, junior high, and high schools, so redirecting them would not add busing costs (and might well reduce them, since much of North Lincoln is not within busing distance from Liberty). And it would also make the best use of our existing elementary capacity; we have more elementary capacity on the east side than in the North Corridor or on the west side, so keeping those areas at east side elementary schools makes sense.

Splitting feeders is never an ideal choice, but given the other feasible options—which involve putting real transportation burdens on families in low-income areas—these ideas seem like the least bad option.

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There are more aspects of this issue that I could discuss, but I should bring this particular post to a close. My main goal was to provide an explanation of my thinking on this issue to the many people who have contacted me about it. As with all blogging, though, I am also using this space to think out loud to some extent. I am not sure any of us will ever succeed in mastering all the aspects of this issue, and I’m sure I still need to be educated about additional perspectives on it. Please chime in with comments.

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Note on calculations: To estimate the FRL rates under the different possible secondary boundary plans, I took the current number of students receiving free- or reduced-price lunch at City or West this year (1086) and reallocated that number among the three secondary zones in the current feeder plan and in the alternative plan. To do that, I assumed that the secondary enrollment from each elementary attendance area would be proportional to each area’s share of the total elementary enrollment. I ended up with the following FRL rates under the current plan: Liberty: 222 FRL out of 1100 students (20%); West: 435 FRL out of 1319 students (33%); City: 429 FRL out of 1277 students (34%). Under the alternative plan: Liberty: 153 FRL out of 1000 students (15%); West: 449 FRL out of 1342 students (33%), City: 483 FRL out of 1355 students (36%). I assumed that the FRL rate of Tate High, the district’s alternative high school that does not have an attendance zone, would remain at roughly 64% under either feeder plan.

It’s not a perfect way to estimate, but it’s the best I could come up with, and I think it yields pretty good ballpark figures. Again, it is based on what the numbers would look like this year under the different scenarios. Will the numbers change in the future? Almost certainly they will, but is very hard to project FRL rates into the future, since they hinge to some extent on changes in the economy, on changes in the location and availability of affordable housing, and on the degree to which eligible families actually enroll in the free- and reduced-price lunch program. (The company that makes our enrollment projections does not attempt to project FRL rates.)

Some have argued that FRL rates at the secondary level will continue to rise, and have cited the higher rates at the elementary and junior high level. There is probably some element of truth to that, but it’s hard to quantify, because historically FRL rates have consistently been higher in the early grades and lower in the later grades. On average over the past ten years, the high school FRL rate has been about four percentage points lower than the junior high rate, and that difference has been even larger (eight points) at Southeast and City. So even though Southeast’s current FRL rate is higher than City’s, it’s not safe to assume that City’s will rise to that same level.

The current secondary feeder plan will create significant overcrowding at Liberty High

[Update: In response to the arguments in this post, my fellow board member Brian Kirschling argued that the growth at Liberty High would not climb as quickly as I estimated, because the students in the North Corridor are disproportionately in the lower grades. As a result, the board asked the administration to project class sizes by looking at the cohorts of students in the different grade levels assigned to Liberty High. Under that analysis, the projected overcrowding would not be as high as I estimate it here, though Liberty High would still be at least 9% overcrowded in 2019 (the first year it has four full classes) and would be overcrowded by over 20% by 2021, and that’s not even accounting for the expected population growth in the North Corridor. I discuss those projections in this post.]

The school board is scheduled to continue its discussion of secondary boundaries at Tuesday’s meeting. The current secondary plan is a “feeder plan”—that is, it designates particular elementary school zones to go to particular secondary schools. As a result, the actual secondary boundaries depend on the boundaries of the elementary zones, which also have to change, since the district plans to open two new elementary schools in 2019.

One thing that concerns me about the current plan is that it will result in overcrowding at Liberty High. When Liberty opens in 2017, it will be a 1000-seat high school; then, five years later, it will receive a 500-seat addition. We don’t have enrollment projections for Liberty, because its boundaries were not settled when we got our most recent projections in 2014 (and they are still not settled). But we do have enrollment projections for our current elementary attendance areas, and we know that there is significant growth projected for the schools that are designated to feed into Liberty High.

One historically reliable way to estimate how many high school students an area will have is to take the number of elementary students and divide by two. (You can see how reliable that rule of thumb is here; our enrollment projections for 2019 also show nearly exactly that ratio. I used the ratio in those projections—2.05:1—for the calculations in this post.) If anything, that rule of thumb has a tendency to slightly understate the high school population.

Under the current plan, five elementary schools feed into Liberty: Garner, Grant, Kirkwood, Penn, and Van Allen. We don’t yet know the exact boundaries for Grant, but we know that it will take at least some portion of the current Wickham zone, where the site for Grant is located. The proposals we’ve seen would put about a quarter of Wickham’s current enrollment there.

It is hard to project what enrollment at Liberty will be in its first two years, because in its first year junior and seniors in the Liberty zone will have the option to remain at West, and in the second year seniors will have that option. But by Liberty’s third year, it’s clear that the current feeder plan will result in significant overcrowding there. Under our projections, the elementary enrollment in our current Garner, Kirkwood, Penn, and Van Allen zones, plus a quarter of the Wickham zone, will be about 2583 students in 2019. That means the high school enrollment generated by those areas is likely to be roughly 1260—twenty-six percent over Liberty’s capacity. (Although the boundaries of those elementary zones could change, it is unlikely that any changes would significantly reduce the number of kids from those zones heading to Liberty.)

And that’s just the bare minimum of what we can expect in the Liberty zone. The Grant scenarios we’ve seen have also included all or part of the “North Lincoln” area, which would add about another 40-60 students to the Liberty enrollment in 2019, pushing it to 30% over capacity. These are conservative estimates; there are concerns that our projections in the North Corridor are not catching the full extent of growth that is likely to occur around Grant and Liberty, so the actual Liberty enrollment could end up even higher.

And that’s just in 2019. Liberty doesn’t get its addition until 2022, and enrollment in the area is projected to grow throughout that time. By 2021, for example—the year before Liberty gets its addition—those elementary zones, even without North Lincoln, are projected to enroll about 2862 students, which likely means almost 1400 high school students, pushing Liberty to almost 40% over capacity, and over 43% if North Lincoln is included.

At the same time, the same kind of projection applied to West High shows about 222 available seats in 2019 and 185 available seats in 2021.

I know that our capacity numbers are meant to include some margin for error—it would probably be better to call them “target enrollment” numbers—and that we can’t expect to bring enrollment at all of our buildings within capacity in the short term. Nonetheless, overages of 20% and above strike me as a concern, especially when there are seats available elsewhere.

There are similar concerns about enrollment exceeding capacity at North Central Junior High, which has a capacity of 505 and does not get an addition until 2021. It’s harder to estimate those numbers, because the current plan allows Kirkwood-area students the option to choose between North Central and North West. But even without counting Kirkwood students or North Lincoln students, North Central is likely to be over capacity in 2018.

Unlike the other areas being routed to Liberty, Kirkwood is significantly closer and more convenient to West High. A high percentage of Kirkwood-area students come from low-income families; sending those kids to more distant secondary schools adds to the difficulties they already face. The great majority of the feedback we’ve received from Kirkwood families is that they prefer to stay at West. Add the overcrowding concern, and it seems particularly unwise to route the Kirkwood area to Liberty High.

[This is the corrected version of a post that I posted earlier today. In the original version, I forgot to take account of the fact that some students would have the option to stay at West during Liberty’s first two years.]

Update on redistricting discussion

Very busy work week, so very little posting. But I did want to post an update on the board’s redistricting discussions. We had a work session on Tuesday where some of the board members (including me) expressed some reservations about whether it makes sense to try to settle the 2019 elementary boundaries by this May, which has been the board’s stated goal. Here are some of the concerns:

• We’re drawing districts for schools three and a half years before those schools are scheduled to open.

• We’re using enrollment projections that were done almost five years before those schools are scheduled to open.

• The 2017 school board election will occur two years before the new districts will take effect. That means that any redistricting decision we make will be subject to change by the next board, which could have as many as three new members.

• We’re drawing a district for a school (Grant Elementary) that we don’t even know if we’ll have the funding to build. The funding for Grant is part of a planned $100+ million bond proposal that will go to the voters in 2017. If the bond doesn’t pass (and if the state doesn’t bail us out by extending our SAVE funding in the meantime), any redistricting we do will have to be redone after the 2017 election. This is an issue beyond just Grant, as our redistricting is also taking into consideration the planned bond-funded additions at other schools such as Garner and Lemme.

• Proceeding on schedule almost certainly means using traditional attendance zones. Yet there has been a lot of discussion about the possibility of developing a plan to reduce the concentration in any one school of students with high levels of need. (For this purpose, the district uses, as a proxy for high need, the number of students who are receiving free or reduced-price lunch, who are English-language learners, or who are receiving special ed services.) To significantly reduce those concentrations using traditional attendance zones would require very substantial changes in boundaries and possibly additional busing expenses.
  
  I have been trying to read up on some of the social science literature on efforts to diversify schools by socioeconomic class. I hope to post in more detail about that literature at some point. One aspect of that literature is that it focuses largely on incentive-based ideas (such as magnet schools) or other systems that give parents some degree of choice in the selection of schools—as opposed to mandatory assignment to schools through traditional attendance zones. (“[T]oday’s integration relies on public school choice, magnet schools, and incentives, rather than compulsion,” writes Richard Kahlenberg.)
  
  I don’t think we can consider a system like that if we have to act in the next eight weeks; there is just not enough time to develop and evaluate one. (Yes, the district did a magnet school study, but it would still be a tall order to turn that into a concrete plan that could win board approval in the next eight weeks.) So by settling the 2019 boundaries now, we might be short-circuiting the discussion of choice-based arrangements, or we might be moving forward with an approach that the next board will reject. Holding off on the decision, on the other hand, would give advocates more time to develop those ideas, to build support for them in the community, and to advocate for particular board candidates.

Would there be drawbacks to waiting? Yes. For one thing, we just solicited community input and received feedback from people in sixty neighborhoods. That feedback wouldn’t suddenly become invalid if we waited, but we certainly raised an expectation that we’d move forward. And I’m sure some people would prefer to have closure sooner rather than later (though, again, anything we do would be subject to change by the next board).

There is also the issue of the effect on secondary school assignments. Our current secondary feeder plan—which has to go into effect by 2017, when we’re opening a new high school—doesn’t actually draw secondary boundaries; it just assigns certain elementary school areas to particular secondary schools. Under that kind of feeder plan, it makes sense to settle the elementary boundaries before the new high school opens. (See this long, boring post.)

I have my doubts about some aspects of the feeder plan, but I’ve been arguing that we should revisit it only after we’ve settled elementary boundaries. If we were to delay the elementary redistricting, though, we would have to go ahead and settle who’s going to go to which secondary schools in 2017. And we might have to do it by actually drawing secondary boundaries.

For example, under our current feeder plan, the land right across the street from Liberty High is in the Wickham Elementary zone—and thus would attend West High. The assumption has always been that that land will become part of the Grant Elementary zone, and thus end up (sensibly) at Liberty. If we postpone drawing the elementary boundaries, it would still make sense to determine that a portion of the Wickham zone should attend Liberty when it opens. We could go ahead and decide that now. If that line becomes the southern boundary of the Grant zone in 2019, fine; or, if necessary, the board can adjust it when it eventually draws the Grant zone.

Regardless of what we do with 2019 attendance zones, it makes sense to look for shorter-term ways to address some of the challenges faced by schools that have a lot of kids with high levels of need. The district has begun to implement a weighted resource allocation plan that is a step in that direction. In particular, I’d like to see if we could reduce class sizes at high-need schools (which means, yes, at the expense of class sizes elsewhere). If that has the added effect of pulling kids from other areas into those schools through voluntary transfers, that would be good to know. I hope I can discuss that more in a future post.

Please note: All of this is just thinking out loud. It takes time to think through all the implications of pursuing one course rather than another in such a complex enterprise (which is my only excuse for not anticipating some of these issues sooner). I’m still thinking them through, and I suspect other board members are, too. Maybe the board will decide that going forward now makes sense. Maybe some other Eureka moment is just around the corner. As our board chair says, we need to go through a phase of diverging before we can start to converge. Better to get these concerns talked out than to regret not raising them afterward.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

School board agenda for March 22

Some of the items on the agenda for Tuesday’s board meeting:

The administration is asking the board to approve three high-level administrative hires: Diane Schumacher as Director of Curriculum/Instruction/Assessment, Adam Kurth as Director of Technology/Innovation, and Scott Kibby as principal of Liberty High. News coverage here. Agenda item here.

I asked that we put our community comment policy on the agenda. The current policy allows up to one hour of community comment at the beginning of each board meeting, with each speaker allowed to speak for up to four minutes; after an hour, any further speakers are put off until the end of the meeting, which might be hours later. By that time, the board may already have acted on the topic the speakers came to address. I know we can’t allow an infinite number of speakers, but I’d rather hear from more people at the beginning of the meeting. I raised the issue now because as we go into the redistricting process, we could see an increase in the number of speakers.

We’ll also be asked to approve the 2017 Operations Life Cycle budget. This budget allocates money from the Physical Plant and Equipment Levy (PPEL) and the Secure an Advanced Vision for Education (SAVE) fund. Both PPEL and SAVE funds can be used to maintain, repair, and upgrade physical facilities and grounds. Those funds cannot be spent on operational expenses such as teacher salaries. More info here.

After the board meeting, we’ll have a work session to continue our discussion about redistricting. Info here. There are not yet any scenarios on the table; so far, we’ve still been asking for information about “building blocks”—that is, how many students live in particular areas.

All that and more. The full agendas are here and here. Please chime in on anything that catches your attention.

March 1 special board meeting on redistricting

This Tuesday, March 1, the school board will hold a special meeting to hear public comment on the redistricting of attendance zones.

The board has to draw new elementary school boundaries because it plans to open two new elementary schools in 2019—Grant Elementary in the North Corridor and Hoover East Elementary on the far east side of Iowa City. This redistricting may also give the board an opportunity to address some of the overcrowding that is projected to occur under our current boundaries. (By “overcrowding,” I mean situations where projected enrollment will exceed a school’s capacity.)

The elementary redistricting will also affect secondary school assignments. The previous board settled on a secondary feeder plan under which certain elementary schools would feed into certain junior highs, which would then feed into certain high schools. Some of the current board members appear to be interested in reconsidering that feeder plan as part of this redistricting process. But even if the plan stays in place, some people’s secondary destinations will change if they are rezoned into different elementary schools than they currently attend. For example, it’s possible that some families currently in the Wickham attendance area will be rezoned into the new Grant attendance area, which would change their junior high and high school destinations.

The new elementary school zones will take effect in 2019, when Grant and Hoover East open. But the secondary feeder plan, based on those redrawn elementary zones, will take effect in 2017, when Liberty High opens. (See this post.)

At the meeting on Tuesday, members of the public are invited to address the board about their redistricting preferences. We’re expecting that some of the speakers will be speaking on behalf of their neighborhoods, having submitted a neighborhood input form. The board members will have an opportunity to ask questions of the speakers to make sure we understand the input.

More information here.

Transition to new secondary boundaries

Because our school district is opening a new high school in 2017, it will need to transition to a new set of secondary (i.e., junior high and high school) boundaries. There are so many moving parts to this issue that it can make your head spin. Here’s my attempt to summarize the issue. As usual, I’m speaking only for myself here, not for the full board or the district. This will be a very long post that will not be of interest to everyone.

Last year, the board addressed what our secondary school boundaries will be when Liberty High opens in 2017. Technically, the board didn’t actually set the boundaries for the new high school; it just determined the “feeder system.” It decided to use a (mostly) “clean” feeder system: Southeast Junior High kids will go to City High; Northwest Junior High kids will go to West High, and North Central Junior High kids will go to Liberty High. It also determined which elementary schools would feed into which junior highs.

So the actual boundaries for the secondary schools will depend on what the elementary school boundaries are. The board has to draw new elementary boundaries because it’s opening two new elementary schools in 2019—Grant Elementary in the North Corridor and “Hoover East” on the far east side of Iowa City. Even though those schools won’t open until 2019, it makes sense to set the boundaries now, because they affect the secondary boundaries that will go into effect in 2017. The board plans to determine those boundaries over the next couple of months, finishing by May.

So, for example: Suppose you live in Coralville and have a kid who will be in seventh grade in 2017-18. You might not have any kids in elementary school, and you know that Grant Elementary won’t open until 2019 anyway. But you’d still like to know if your house will be in the Grant attendance area, because if it is, your child will end up Liberty High someday. And if that’s true, you might prefer to have your seventh-grader go to North Central Junior High, with all the other kids who will end up Liberty, instead of Northwest, where most kids will end up at West High. So it makes sense for us to draw the Grant Elementary boundary now. Then we can have those Liberty-bound kids start junior high in 2017 at North Central instead of Northwest.

But then another issue arises, and this is the one we discussed at last Tuesday’s meeting. What about kids who will start junior high next year, in 2016? Our new secondary feeder plan doesn’t go into effect until 2017, but if you know your child will end up at a particular high school under our plan, you might want her to start at the junior high that will eventually feed into that high school. This year’s sixth-graders are already signing up for their junior high courses; if we’re going to change their junior high destination for next year, we would need to do that as soon as possible.

Topics on the December 8 board meeting agenda

Some of the topics we’ll be discussing at this Tuesday’s school board meeting:

We’ll hear a review of the district’s progress in addressing disproportionate referral of African-American students to special education services. Info here.

We’ll be revisiting the topic of the Smarter Balanced Assessments. After having failed to persuade the legislature to require these very expensive standardized tests, the State Board of Education decided it had the power to impose them without legislative approval, and did so via an administrative rule (over the formal objection of our board). Info here. What’s the next step?

We’ll discuss the possibility of exploring a year-round school alternative. There are no details about this topic included in the agenda.

We’ll hear the district’s annual financial audit report. Info here.

We’ll hear from the committee that examined the issue of discretionary busing. To be entitled to a school bus under state law, a student needs to live a certain distance from his or her school — over two miles for elementary and junior high, and over three miles for high school. We’re free, though, to provide buses for kids who live closer if we choose to. We can’t afford to do much of that “discretionary busing,” however. A committee has been considering what our standards should be for offering discretionary busing.

We’ll hear a proposal for how to handle athletics as part of the transition to opening Liberty High. When Liberty opens in 2017, students who are juniors and seniors at West will have the option of staying on at West. That will pose some challenges for fielding sports teams during Liberty’s initial couple of years. The administration will discuss its recommendation for how to handle those challenges. Info here.

And more! The full agenda is here; please chime in if anything attracts your attention.