School District Continues Study of New Boundaries

Schreder and Associates presented an updated proposal for new elementary school boundaries on Tuesday, Feb. 15. (The previously proposed scenarios are available .) The revised scenarios attempt to take into account concerns board members and the public had about making families go past to .

However, because there are not enough kids around Upper Brookside, in order to make all the schools equal size, after the two Brookside campuses become , some areas will have to be assigned to Upper Brookside even though they are closer to another school.

“The challenge here is simple: Upper Brookside needs more kids. So, the question is which people are we going to make unhappy for driving by Lower Brookside – because that’s the only way to get to Upper,” said Board Trustee Conn Hickey.

What the district and Schreder and Associates has attempted to do to address that problem is to focus on neighborhoods that are already having to drive to their assigned school because of distance, traffic, or hills. The idea is that if these students and parents already having to drive, then driving to Brookside Upper wouldn’t be as big a burden. Additionally, it leaves as many kids walking and biking as possible.

However, in nearly every neighborhood there are parents and kids that bike and walk, which makes it a hard calculation.

“This is not a contest between who might be able to bike more realistically,” cautioned Trustee Sharon Sagar, who went on to say the focus should be on keeping communities and neighborhoods together to allow them to develop carpools and groups.

For the purposes of planning, all the neighborhood have been divided and subdivided into planning groups, with the number of students in each of the planning areas noted.

The first scenario (attached at right) assigns the planning group around San Francisco Boulevard and the area between Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Center Boulevard to Upper Brookside. It also assigns the people south of Center and a portion of the kids that go to Manor to Wade Thomas. And it assigns the area behind Good Earth to Manor, which was previously assigned to Brookside.

The student projections (attached at right) for this scenario had a higher number of students at Manor, which is additionally a problem because approximately 20-25 students come from outside the Manor boundaries to attend the MAP program.

The second, revised scenario attempts to address that and assigns that area behind Good Earth (planning zone Brookside 5) back to Brookside Lower.

Suggestions were made to the revised scenario that the area (Brookside 12 and 13) between Sir Francis Drake and Center Boulevards, east of the high school, be assigned more logically to Wade Thomas. That the area back behind United Market could be a candidate for driving to Upper Brookside, because it is hard to kids to be walking from there to Wade Thomas. And that the Manor planning zones 3, 4, 5 – which cover downtown, Deer Park, and the Cascade – be further subdivided better by appropriate neighborhoods, with some of the areas farther away being also candidates to go to Upper.

A final scenario will be presented at the next board meeting.