School Superintendent Answers Questions on Redistricting

In response to questions and comments about a proposal to redistrict students from the , school Supt. Mark Donovan has compiled a list of questions that have been asked about the redistricting plan, with answers. They are posted on his redistricting blog.

Students will be redistricted because the Clapp will close as a public school at the end of this school year in anticipation of the opening this coming summer.

All students from the Goodyear School who have been at the Clapp School while the new Goodyear is being built would go to the Goodyear.

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

Sixty-three students from the Clapp School would go to the .

After the new Goodyear opens, two new elementary schools are planned for the city. One would serve students from the and Schools; the other, students from the and Schools. That plan was “submitted to the Massachusetts School Building Authority as part of the plan to build the Goodyear School,” the blog states.

That’s why, according to the blog, the current proposed redistricting plan does not cover the whole city now. Those two new schools haven’t been built yet. And one of the redistricting goals was to assign students now to modern school buildings.

Why are only Clapp School students being redistricted?

“The Redistricting Committee tried to avoid splitting the Clapp area into too many pieces;" the Clapp and Goodyear schools are in different districts, the blog points out.

“Sending Clapp School students to the new Goodyear was part of the original plan submitted to the Massachusetts School Building Authority,” according to the blog.

Why can’t some Clapp students go to the instead of the White School?

The Reeves “serves almost twice as many students as the Malcolm White does, yet both school have the same basic services:  one principal, one secretary and one nurse. The Malcolm White School has empty classrooms, and the school is, in fact, closer to the neighborhood in question than the Reeves School.”

Sending students to the closest school seems to be a reasonable concept, but, the blog states, “It’s not easy to accomplish in a sensible way”

In various meetings, people have asked about moving some Shamrock students to the Goodyear and Clapp students to the . Under that concept, Shamrock students would be bussed “away from a school that may be only a few streets away” and “a large number of current Clapp students would also be bused to a school, the Shamrock, that would not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a 'neighborhood' school for most students.”

Under the proposed redistricting plan, preliminary class size numbers appear “very similar to the numbers from the past few years,” according to the blog. “Woburn does not allow parents to choose their child’s school.”

One question with “not a great solution,” according to the blog, involves which middle school elementary school students will attend.

Middle school districts will not change. Those districts, “which are defined according to streets, with consideration for out-of-district placement at the Kennedy Middle School, seems to be the most reasonable solution,” the blog states.

A problem arises, according to the blog, because of the location of the Kennedy and Joyce Middle Schools and “the space available to us.”

“If all of the Goodyear students, including students in the original Clapp district are assigned to the Kennedy Middle School, that school becomes overcrowded,” the blog states, “and would result in the hiring of additional staff. Yet if Clapp district students are assigned to the Joyce, they may be separated from their friends as they leave fifth grade."

Parents have indicated “that smaller class sizes were more important that the problem of separating friends.”

Plans have been made to help students from the Clapp School transition to the White School, the blog concludes.

“In recent history, we have some good examples of how the transition works.”

“The Malcolm White School has direct experience with welcoming students in the recent past when they accepted students from the Goodyear because of another overcrowding situation.”

The complete five-page document is available on the superintendent’s blog.