Parents Speak Out on Redistricting Plan for Three Elementary Schools

The first wave of parents crying foul over redistricting students in south county approached the school board at the meeting on Wednesday.

Three elementary schools in south county are planning to redistrict students in a number of neighborhoods due to overcrowding at The school has around 800 students, though it’s designed to hold only 600.

The board received a report on Wednesday that proposes how the redistricting lines would be drawn. The idea was to reduce overcrowding at Central Elementary by sending about 130 students to other area schools, while not overburdening them in the process, and still keeping communities intact.

However, the recommended plan doesn’t eliminate overcrowding. Instead, the student population would be reduced from 127 percent to 107 percent.

Chuck Yochum, a planner with the school system, said this solution wasn’t perfect, but was the path of least resistance to meeting their goals.

“We knew we couldn’t solve every problem without overburdening either Mayo or Davidsonville at the same time,” Yochum said. “But we thought getting 130 students out of the lunch lines and a number of cars out of the driveway in the mornings would certainly go a long way to helping the school.”

The school system administration’s recommendation to redistrict students out of neighboring communities was based on a plan produced by a committee made up of area parents.

The specifics of the plan are as follows:

• Redistrict from Central Elementary to students living along Muddy Creek Road down to and including Wolfe’s Reserve and those students living on Fiddlers Hill Road, as well as those students living east of Muddy Creek Road and south of Central Avenue as it extends to the current boundary with Mayo Elementary, including those living in River Club Estates and along Camp Letts Road.
• Redistrict from Central Elementary to all students living in the communities of Waterford, Annapolis Landing and Berkshire, as well as any student living along the south side of Riva Road within this proposed boundary who may not live in one of these communities.
• An optional grandfathering of rising fifth-graders (current fourth-graders) at Central Elementary.

Parents in the affected communities spoke to the school board after the officials laid out their plan. Most said they didn’t think the redistricting was being done fairly.

Dan Waz, who lives in Wolfe’s Reserve, said he and his wife may have to get different jobs to meet the new schedule of driving their students farther to school each day to Mayo Elementary instead of Central. The school shift adds an extra two miles to his route.

Waz called the recommended plan flawed, and wants other options to be analyzed before the board makes a decision.

“How can you say you’ve considered every possibility? You haven’t,” he said.

Beth Hoyt said she didn’t attend the redistricting committee meetings, because she never thought her own children would be redistricted. She thought nearby Selby Boulevard would go first. However, her neighborhood was chosen, and Selby was not. She said her children burst into tears when they heard they may be going to another school next year.

Patch’s Edgewater-Davidsonville Editor Mitchelle Stephenson chaired the committee that served up the recommended redistricting plan. After the meeting, Stephenson said that although some parents seemed agitated by the plan, they considered every option before coming to a conclusion.

“There was a method to our madness,” she said.

In the case of Selby, she said there was no clean way to break apart the large community. Keeping communities intact was one of the things the committee tried to focus on in sending students to both Mayo and Davidsonville, she said.

A public hearing on the redistricting plan is scheduled for January. The board must approve some form of plan before April, but they are not bound to the recommendation currently before them.