School Officials Unveil Elementary Redistricting Plan

The “working draft” of an elementary school redistricting plan debuted Tuesday night at a meeting at the , which will close as a public school at the end of this school year.

Under the draft, all students from the Goodyear School who have been at the Clapp School would go to the new building.

One hundred Clapp School students would also go to the Goodyear School; 63 students from the Clapp School would go to .

The , White and  schools would retain their students.

School Supt. Mark Donovan presented four scenarios that the redistricting committee developed and considered.

Donovan outlined some of the criteria the committee considered. You don’t want to “disassemble well-functioning schools,” he said, or cause unnecessary disruption. You do want to redistrict students into new school facilities, he said.

As much as possible, you want to preserve neighborhoods, particularly the Clapp School neighborhood, Donovan said, realizing that the children on the borders of neighborhoods have to go somewhere.

One of the challenges of redistricting, the superintendent said, is the relative locations of four elementary schools: the Goodyear, Shamrock, Reeves and White Schools.

Another is the capacity of the schools to accept more students. The Reeves enrolls 513 students, Donovan said, and houses two special special education programs and a preschool. Enrollment at the White School is 264, he said; at the Shamrock School, 393 students.

People who responded to a redistricting survey indicated that their main concern was class size, the superintendent said.

Response to the plan

After the superintendent’s 35-minute presentation, about two dozen people in the audience of about 65 offered comments and questions.

Questions ranged from class size to the number of elementary school-age children in Woburn to how elementary school students are assigned to either the or .

After the meeting, several parents offered their take on the draft redistricting plan.

The proposal “looks reasonable, with the (enrollment) numbers at the other schools,” said John Bogus. The whole issue “boils down,” he said, "to limited resources and how to allocate them.”

“The end result is that our school is closing,” said Karen Curran, who has a first-grader at the Clapp School and a three-year-old. Residents of the Clapp School neighborhood who bought a house there so their children could walk to school won’t be able to do that, she said. “At the end of the day, it’s teachers who teach, not a building,” she added.

There won’t be a neighborhood school anymore for the Clapp School neighborhood, added Sara Oliveira, who also has a first-grader at the Clapp School and a two-year-old.

“They’ve done the best they could in a difficult situation, in an imperfect world,” said Paula Murphy. We are past the point of complaining about the loss of a neighborhood school, she said. “We have to be able to make a community wherever we go,” she added.

Alderman Rosa DiTucci, who lives in the Clapp School neighborhood, said the plan is not a city-wide plan.

"I’m appreciative of the hard work that went into this plan, but as one of the residents said last night, it’s not a city-wide redistricting as we had been promised," said DiTucci. "It is a redistribution of the Clapp School students. They are being sent to schools farther away from their homes than other children. They are being bused past other schools to get to their destitnation."

DiTucci urged school officials to look at the census data and take into consideration younger children in the Clapp School neighborhood. She also reiterated a question raised at the meeting, where will these children go to middle school?

"The issue of where the children are going to go for middle school is a serious one," said DiTucci. "They have split them up at the elementary level only to potentially split them up again when it comes time for middle school. It’s an unfair burden that is being placed only on the Clapp School children and their families. It is not being evenly distributed across the city."  

A final redistricting plan could be set by as soon as March 15, Donovan told the audience. That’s when the redistricting committee will next meet and review input from four meetings on the redistricting proposal.

The redistricting committee is comprised of the principal and a parent and teacher from the Clapp, White, Reeves and Shamrock schools, the superintendent noted.

Meetings on the draft plan will be held at the , Wednesday, March 2; the , March 7; and at the , March 10.