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.

School board agenda for May 24

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

We’ll discuss the process for filling the vacancy on the board created by the departure of board member Tom Yates. More information here; see also this post.

We’ll vote on approval of an amended certified budget, receive our annual asset protection review, and hear an update on the district’s Wellness Policy.

At our work session after the board meeting, we’ll continue our discussion of secondary attendance areas. Information here.

The full agendas are here and here; feel free to chime in with a comment on anything that catches your attention.

How does the school board fill a vacancy?

UPDATE 5/25/16: Last night, the board voted to move ahead with an appointment process to fill the vacancy. I supported the motion, simply because the state statutes appear to require us to at least begin such a process, and because there is no harm in talking about an appointment. I’m still inclined, however, to think that an election makes a lot of sense. Some other board members also recognized the potential value of filling the seat through an election.

We scheduled a special board meeting for June 7 to decide whether to make an appointment. Applications for the appointment are due by 4 p.m. on June 1; the application form is here. See the timeline here. Again, applicants should understand that the board may end up letting the seat go to election rather than appoint someone. Failure to submit an application for the appointment will not affect your eligibility to run as a candidate if there is a special election; that is a separate process.

As I mentioned below, it is also possible that people could file a petition to skip the appointment process and go straight to an election. That petition would have to be filed by June 2. If such a petition is filed and validated, we would cancel our June 7 special meeting.

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Because of the resignation of one of our board members, Tom Yates, the school board now has a vacancy to fill. As I understand it, this is how the law handles school board vacancies.

State law says that the school board “shall” fill a vacancy by appointment. However, there are two potentially applicable situations under which the vacancy may be filled through an election. First, if the board does not agree on an appointment within thirty days of the vacancy, then there has to be a special election to fill the vacancy. The vacancy occurred on May 13. That means that if the board does not fill it by June 12, there will have to be a special election. Our only scheduled meeting before that date is on May 24.

Second, even if the board intends to appoint someone, there will be a special election if voters petition for one. The petition would have to be signed by eligible voters totaling thirty percent of the votes cast in the last school election—which, in this case, means 2,190 signatures. (As I understand it, “eligible” voters means anyone who is eligible to register to vote, even if they are not actually registered.) The petition would have to be filed with the board secretary within two weeks after the board notified the public of its intention to fill the vacancy with an appointment. The board published that notice on May 19, so any petition to trigger an election would have to be filed by June 2.

Any special election to fill the seat would have to be held between sixty and seventy days after the vacancy occurred—which means Election Day would be either July 12 or July 19.

An election would fill the seat for the remainder of the term, which expires in September 2019. An appointment would fill it until the next school election, which is in September 2017 (unless the district schedules any bond vote sooner). [This is a correction from the initial version of this post; see the comment, below.]

Again, this post reflects my understanding of how the process works, based on my reading of the statutes. Please do not take it as the official word of the district, the school board, or the Auditor’s Office.

The board plans to discuss how to fill the vacancy at its meeting tonight (May 24). My initial inclination, especially given that the election would fill the seat for over three years, is that an election makes more sense than an appointment, for the reasons I wrote about here in 2014.

Update on elementary attendance areas, May 17

Information about the new elementary boundaries is now available on the district website.

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.

Update on elementary and secondary boundaries

Last night the board voted 4-3 to change the secondary feeder plan to assign the Kirkwood Elementary area to North West Junior High and West High. I voted in favor of the change, for the reasons I wrote about here. We did not reach a conclusion about the secondary path of the Alexander Elementary area, and we scheduled a work session to continue the discussion. I favor assigning Alexander to the Southeast/City path.

During the meeting, there was some suggestion that if both Kirkwood and Alexander were assigned to West High, West’s FRL (free and reduced-price lunch) rate would be 55%. This is almost certainly inaccurate, as started to become apparent before we ended the discussion. The board (including me) should not have been asking the superintendent to estimate those numbers on the fly. I assume we will get a more finalized calculation of the relevant FRL rates before our next meeting.

The board also voted 4-3 to adopt a set of elementary boundaries, most of which are to take effect in 2019. I voted against that decision. I believe the adopted boundaries are very likely to change, possibly considerably, when the board gets updated enrollment projections and reviews the facilities master plan. The adoption of those boundaries just gives people a false sense of certainty about where their kids will go to school, and it will cause people to be that much more upset when necessary changes are made. I don’t think we’re doing anyone a service by announcing boundaries when there’s a good chance those boundaries will change within a year. (I also have disagreements with specific aspects of the boundaries the board adopted; that’s a topic for another post.)

It was a pretty contentious meeting, as they go. There is wide range of viewpoints on our board and in our community, and there is sometimes vigorous disagreement in our meetings. I’m not bothered by that; I think that’s just how democracy works, and I’d rather have the disagreements hashed out openly so we can hear all the arguments. Community comment last night was particularly valuable and at times outright moving. As contentious as our meetings can be, there’s always a part of me that just feels privileged to be there and to experience the democratic process in that way.

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.]

School board agenda for Tuesday, May 10

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

We’ll talk about a proposal to change our aspirational class size goals to create somewhat smaller class sizes at schools that have higher rates of kids receiving free- or reduced-price lunch (a proxy for low-income households), kids receiving special education services, and kids in the English language learner program. The rationale is that those groups have shown significantly lower proficiency rates on reading and math tests, and so have a higher level of need. More information here.

We’ll hear our quarterly financial report. More information here.

We’ll continue our discussion of redistricting. I am hopeful that at this meeting or the next one, we will resolve our secondary boundary situation one way or another. More information here.

The full agendas are here and here. Feel free to chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

School board agenda topics for Tuesday, April 26

Sorry for the late post—have been a little under the weather. Some of the items on tonight’s school board agenda:

We’ll discuss a proposed Integrated Pest Management policy that would govern the use of pesticides and herbicides on school grounds. Info here.

We’ll hear reports about the students’ Iowa Assessment scores and about the district’s Comprehensive School Improvement Plan.

We’ll hear a report on the results of the district’s survey of students about their experience of school, including a discussion of how we could improve in creating a more inclusive and equitable environment for students. Info here.

At our work session, we’ll continue our discussion of redistricting. Info here.

The full agendas are here and here. Feel free to chime in with comments about anything that catches your attention.

Where the students are

As the board thinks about possible changes to elementary attendance zones to prepare for the opening of new schools and to accommodate projected enrollment growth, it’s helpful to be able to visualize where the students are. For that reason, I frequently refer to the Student Density Map that the district made in 2014. Now the administration has provided us with updated maps that give us additional information about just how many students live in which areas.

Another way to get a sense of where the students are is to see how many elementary students live within a mile of each school. To me, this was one of the most striking aspects of the updated information that we received. Here is the data in descending order:

This chart reinforces my belief that closing Hoover Elementary would be a mistake. Yes, there are several elementary schools that serve the central east side, and many students who live within a mile of Hoover are in another school’s attendance area. But the fact remains that more students live within a mile of Hoover than almost any other school in the entire district, and Hoover’s number is significantly higher than that of any of the schools adjacent to it. That means that it would be easy to draw an attendance zone that would fill the school without any busing—one that would be not just technically “walkable” but actually walkable. It also means that the closure affects a particularly large number of people. It just doesn’t make sense to close a school that is surrounded by kids and then send them all to more distant schools in less densely populated areas.

It’s also worth noting that when the district recently asked for neighborhood input on elementary school preferences, more people signed preference forms identifying Hoover as their first choice than did so for any other school, by a significant margin—even though Hoover was not listed as an option on the form. It’s certainly possible to read too much into those forms; there were a lot of factors that drove participation more in some areas than others. Hoover residents may have been particularly likely to participate because of the planned closure, but Hoover received more signatures (343) than other schools in areas that will also necessarily be subject to boundary changes, such as Grant (221) and Hoover East (33). At the very least, it’s another indicator of just how many people are affected by the closure and how strongly they feel about keeping Hoover open.

In any event, the chart and the underlying maps are worth a close look. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

A different possible way forward

[I drafted the following and have asked that it be added to the agenda for tonight’s school board work session.]

Dear Fellow Directors,

As I’ve mentioned during our recent work sessions, I have growing doubts about the wisdom of proceeding with our current timeline for elementary redistricting, which would have us complete a 2019 redistricting plan by next month. I just wanted to put some of those thoughts in writing and make an initial proposal.

There are several reasons why I think we should reconsider proceeding with elementary redistricting:

• We’re drawing districts for schools that we don’t plan to open for another three and a half years.

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

• There is a board election about halfway between now and when the new schools will open. That means that any redistricting we do will be subject to change by the next board. We can’t count on the next board to agree with decisions that we’ve made, especially if those decisions trigger opposition that is expressed in the voting booth.

• We don’t know whether the funding for Grant and other capacity additions will materialize. If it doesn’t, much of the redistricting we do will have to be undone by the next board.

• Proceeding on schedule effectively rules out anything but traditional attendance zones. If we wanted to look at other options, such as paired schools or magnet options, it would take longer than just a month or two to develop the proposal and build community support.

• It may make sense to open Grant in a different location than currently planned, and to defer opening a school on the planned Grant site until a later year when the area around it will be more developed. We should resolve that question before proceeding with elementary redistricting.

• Redistricting now could decrease the chances of passing a bond in 2017.

• It is increasingly hard to see how we can get to four “yes” votes on any redistricting plan by our target May deadline.

These reasons basically boil down to two. First, there are too many uncertainties that could end up altering what we would choose to do with 2019 redistricting. Second, I’m afraid that the whole process is taking our eye off the more important ball: putting the district in the best position to pass a bond that will fund our facilities plan.

In my view, that means revisiting the Facilities Master Plan. Again, it’s possible that we might have better options for where to put the next new school in the North Corridor. That, in turn, could affect when we would proceed with the Garner addition, and/or how large that addition should be. That in turn could affect the scheduling of other additions. It’s also possible (especially after we get updated enrollment projections) that we will find that we need additional capacity in the North Corridor sooner than we were expecting. If it were up to me, we would reverse the decision to close Hoover Elementary, so as not to generate a capacity need on the east side any sooner than necessary. As a result, I would cancel the Lemme addition. Whatever renovations Hoover still needs could be put later in the timeline, enabling us to advance other projects that are more urgent—for example, we might then be able to address overcrowding at Horn. I could go on.

If there’s a reasonable possibility that we’ll alter the Facilities Master Plan after getting new enrollment projections, it just doesn’t make sense to do redistricting first. Moreover, redistricting will divert our energy from the more important task. The importance to the district of getting the board and the community united around a bond proposal far outweighs the value of settling 2019 boundaries now.

Here’s what I would propose:

1. Table elementary redistricting for now. Alternatively, confine our discussion of elementary redistricting to changes that we could make in 2017 to address urgent needs (such as particularly urgent overcrowding concerns) that can’t wait until 2019.

2. Settle secondary boundaries as soon as possible. To do so, we should draw Liberty’s boundary by anticipating what our decision about Grant’s southern boundary would be if it goes forward on its planned site. (It would not be necessary, though, to settle the boundary between Grant and Garner or Penn, since those students will all attend Liberty regardless.) In my view, we should consider splitting some elementary schools after sixth grade—for example, sending “North Lincoln” (or some portion of it) to North Central and Liberty even if we don’t yet know whether they will be districted out of Lincoln for elementary school.

3. Obtain updated enrollment projections as soon as we can.

4. Revisit the Facilities Master Plan using updated projections and with an eye on maximizing the chance of bond passage.

5. Then return to the topic of elementary redistricting. Although it makes sense for the final decision on 2019 attendance zones to be made by the next board, we could play a constructive role by developing concrete options (traditional attendance areas? paired schools? magnets?) that candidates and voters could discuss during the 2017 board election.

I am writing this fairly quickly in hopes of getting it on the agenda for the April 12 work session. I mean it only as a starting point for discussion. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

School board agenda for Tuesday, April 12

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

We’ll hear appeals and concerns related to our decision earlier this year to cut back on providing discretionary busing to areas that are not far enough from their schools to qualify for busing under state law. We’ll also get an update on our Pay-to-Ride program for people who don’t qualify for discretionary busing. Previous posts here and here.

We’ll vote on approval of the district’s 2016-17 budget. Information here.

We’ll have a work session to continue our discussion of redistricting. Information here; previous related posts here.

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

What would stronger weighted resource reallocation look like?

There has been ongoing discussion in our district about the fact that some schools have a much higher percentage of “high need” kids than other schools do. People have advocated for various ways to help the higher-need kids: some say we should redistrict to avoid high concentrations of high-need kids in any one school; some want to use magnet schools or paired schools to achieve the same end; some want to direct disproportionate resources toward schools with disproportionate need. These are not mutually exclusive ideas; the district could use redistricting, magnets, or paired schools to some extent and then try to address remaining disparities with resource allocation.

Our district has already begun a “weighted resource allocation” plan. So far, the plan has involved allocating certain types of staff support (such as School Administration Managers) toward schools with more high-need kids. As I understand it, the plan has not (yet?) progressed to reallocating classroom teachers (though some ad hoc recognition of high-need schools may have occurred to a limited extent). Since the bulk of our operating budget is spent on classroom teachers, applying the plan to classroom teachers would greatly increase how much resource reallocation we could do.

That said, it’s easy to say that we should reallocate resources, and harder to know what that would actually entail. The goal of this post is to imagine what it might look like if we deliberately tilted the allocation of classroom teachers toward schools with more high-need kids. So I did an elaborate mathematical experiment. To begin, I defined “high need” simply by using the percentage of kids who receive free or reduced-price lunch at each school. This is not a perfect proxy for “high need,” but it’s a pretty good one; we’ve seen big disparities between FRL and non-FRL kids on statewide assessments of reading and math proficiency. (Our district has begun to use a more complex indicator that also takes into account the number of kids in special education and in the English-language learning program. I hope to write more on the measurement of “high need” in a future post.)

Then, I decided to assign a greater “weight” to high-need students, on the theory that the kids with more need should get more teachers. To keep it straightforward, I decided to give each high-need kid the weight of two students and then reallocate teachers accordingly. That means that class sizes in a 100% high-need school would, on average, be half the size of those in a 0% high-need school. And since we don’t have any schools that are 100% or 0% high need, the actual class size differences would not be that large on average.

How would that system change the allocation of teachers in our elementary schools? Here’s what happened when I ran the numbers:

What would the resulting class sizes look like? First, let’s see what they look like now. Here is a chart showing the class sizes in our elementary schools as of October 2015. Green squares indicate class sizes that are below-median for that grade; red squares are above median. I’ve listed the schools in decreasing order of FRL percentage, so the higher-need schools are at the top. (Click to enlarge.)

As you can see, there is a little more green toward the top of the chart than at the bottom, but the pattern is inconsistent and not very strong. (Caveat: I used the class size numbers from the district’s October 2015 report; there have almost certainly been changes since that time, both in the number of students and possibly in assignment of teachers.) Now here’s what it would look like if we reallocated that same number of teachers based strictly on giving high-need students the weight of two students (click to enlarge):

On the one hand, you can see that the pattern is much stronger and more consistent: schools with more high-need kids would get consistently smaller class sizes. On the other hand, you can see just how much it would come at the expense of the schools with the fewest high-need kids. Class sizes would be significantly larger there. In fact, toward the bottom of the chart, I had to start combining grades (that is, having mixed classes of first- and second-graders, or third- and fourth-graders, or fifth- and sixth-graders), in order to avoid class sizes in the forties or worse. Even then some of the class sizes were pretty steep.

There are many, many possible critiques of the method I used here to determine reallocation. FRL is not a perfect proxy for need, for example. Two is not necessarily the right multiplier. “Need” is not a binary concept, but varies on a spectrum. Academic need is not the only kind of need. Maybe what high-FRL schools need is not more classroom teachers but more reading specialists. And so on. There are certainly other ways to conceive of how resources might best be directed toward needs. But any attempt to reallocate resources, no matter what the details, will have to recognize that there are consequences, and that the greater the benefit to high-need kids, the more uncomfortable some of those consequences are at the other end.

Seeing a concrete illustration of resource reallocation raises lot of questions. What is the “ceiling” on how high a class size we can tolerate, even at a low-FRL school? Could any plan like this one ever get the buy-in it would need to become a reality—from the public, the board, and the teachers and administrators? Would this approach to addressing disparities be more or less politically sustainable than a purely redistricting-based approach (keeping in mind that a redistricting approach would entail some additional busing expenses that would also affect class size)? Would it be more or less effective at reducing the proficiency gaps? How big would the benefit actually be?

Is it possible that some families would transfer their kids from schools with the higher class sizes to schools with the lower class sizes, taking some of the edge off of the disparities in both class size and FRL? In other words, could it work as a kind of Small Class Size Magnet School plan? On the other hand, to what extent would better-off families simply opt out of the public schools altogether (which costs the district money in per-pupil state aid) if they felt like class sizes at their elementary school were too high?

How would resource reallocation work in the junior highs and high schools? I assume it would have to operate at the classroom level—that is, courses that enroll lots of high-need students would have smaller class sizes, while class sizes would increase in courses that enroll fewer high-need students. (I’m looking at you, AP courses.) Notice that there is an argument for doing this even if our boundary plan equalizes the FRL percentages at each school, since the FRL percentages might still vary widely from classroom to classroom.

Again, this particular approach to resource reallocation is just one of many that are imaginable. But it’s useful because it provides a concrete sense of how resource reallocation could really hash out in practice. One thing you notice right away is how class sizes change not gradually but in quantum leaps: often adding just one teacher to a particular grade in one school changes that grade’s squares from very red to very green. Since you can’t just add a fraction of a classroom teacher to a school, class sizes are not easily fine-tuned or smoothed out.

I know there are limits to what the school district can do to bring up test scores. It is not within our power to erase all the effects of poverty (and other challenges) on our students’ lives. Though I’ll never agree that “educational achievement” can be reduced to a score on a standardized test, the proficiency gaps we’re seeing are clearly telling us something real about how well we’re serving our high-need kids. In my view, some form of resource reallocation toward schools with more high-need kids (not necessarily this particular variation!) ought to be a part of the discussion of how to address those gaps. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not an easy fix and that it might be hard to achieve significant benefits without tolerating some significant costs.

Finally, I’ll be a broken record: The painful trade-offs that you see when you think about class size would be reduced and even eliminated if our governor and state legislature would provide better school funding. I’m not meaning to excuse the school board from using its funding as wisely as possible, but state funding is the primary factor driving class size. Even just bringing Iowa back up to the national median for per-pupil funding would provide our district with millions of dollars of additional operating funds—enough to turn many red squares green and still have something left over to address other needs. Neither political party is perfect on this score, but in practice, increasing school funding requires electing a Democratic legislature this year and a Democratic governor in 2018.

I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts in the comments. How do you think resource reallocation compares to other possible ways to address the proficiency gaps we’re seeing among our high-need kids?