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UPDATE April 22, 2007: Well, the redistricting effort is over and the new maps have been published. The process ended with a marathon Board of Education meeting on April 9, 2007 which lasted until 1:30am, or six hours. The Ohio Sunshine Laws required that they perform their deliberations in public, and the Board seemed to abide. We know that there was certainly a lot of lobbying via the district website, and several neighborhoods submitted petitions to support their various positions. The Board members also individually spoke with the school administrators frequently while performing their own analyses, but to my knowledge, all deliberations were held in public. From paper reports provided to the Redistrict Team, I built a complex spreadsheet so that I could look at the racial distributions of the assignments, something the district officials refused to provide to us (nor do I know if the Board had socioeconomic projections in their data either). The outcome is better than I expected, with each of the three high schools apparently being assigned about the same number of kids of color. However, I have to couch that statement with an admission that my spreadsheet has produced different numbers than the official reports issued by the District administrators. Some of this is because the printer reports I used as a source were based on data almost six months old by now, and also the District's systems have greater precision in assigning students, with house-level address accuracy. We'll have to see how things actually work out when Bradley High School comes online in three years. UPDATE November 17, 2006: I volunteered for and was accepted into the committee set up by the School Board to make recommendations about modifications to the attendance boundaries for the entire school system. With the construction of a new elementary building on Rings Rd, and the new high school on Walker Rd, students need to be shifted to make the best use of the facilities and to prepare for the future. It's a complex task, and it has caused me to review some of the comments I made below, earlier in 2006. The current model we're working with suggests that the elementary school (K-5) population will be about 7,200 in 4 years, meaning that each of the 14 elementary schools will need to average about 500 students out of a total capacity of about 600. The average number of kids per classroom would be about 24 -- a manageable number. It also means that across the district, we have capacity for about 1,400 addition elementary school kids with the new elementary school (and would have had capacity for 800 without it). So do I still think we don't need the Rings Rd elementary school? I'd have to answer that by saying that, no, I don't think we need it yet, but we will likely need additional elementary capacity before long. If that is the case, there is an argument for building it now at today's prices rather than a few years from now when everything could be expected to cost more. But note, once you open a school building, there is an immediate step up in the district's operating costs: staff salaries, utilities, maintenance, and so on. Raw capacity is only part of the story. The difficult part of this task is picking out which neighborhoods feed into which schools. The best solutions will keep neighborhoods together and minimize transportation costs, while paying attention to the socioeconomic diversity of the district. The argument for building the school near Ballantrae was that the kids in Ballantrae had to go all the way to Norwich Elementary to attend class. The distance from the entrance to Ballantrae to Norwich Elementary is four miles. This is, by the way, exactly the same distance that the kids in Westpoint (at US40 and Broad Street) have to travel to get to their nearest school, Brown Elementary. If you sit down with maps and neighborhood population reports, you quickly figure out that Ballantrae was definitely not the optimal place to put a new elementary school. The most crowded schools, and the center of population mass for the district, are those in the central and south central part of the district (Darby Creek, JW Reason, Hoffman Trails), which has been the primary development frontier for the past decade. Interestingly, Darby Creek and JW Reason have the highest minority student populations of all the elementary schools. We should be building this new elementary school on the Walker Rd campus instead. Residential development will soon take place in Brown Twp, and this location would have been much more logical as a place to send kids from the neighborhoods around the Roberts and Alton-Darby intersection. If this had been thought about carefully enough, the School Board could have bought enough land on Walker Rd to house a high school, middle school, sixth grade school and an elementary. The land is available and for sale. It will only get more expensive as time goes on... While emotions are high about the need for a new high school in the Hilliard City School District, it can be easy to overlook the fact that the levy issue includes the money to build a new elementary school near the Ballantrae development on the far north end of the school district. What the school district officials aren't telling us is that there is a lot of available capacity in our elementary schools right now. On the next to last page of the 2006 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report is a table showing the capacity and enrollment for each elementary school in the district. According to this table, each of the 13 elementary schools has a capacity of 600 students, for a total of 7,800 students. The total elementary school enrollment in 2005 was 6,869 students, meaning there is space for 931 additional students at the elementary school level. That's over 1.5 times the capacity of a whole new school. Not all of the elementary schools are filled to the same degree, according to this report. Darby Creek and Hilliard Crossing are both over 100% capacity, by 64 kids at Darby creek and 9 kids at Hilliard Crossing. Other schools are well under capacity: Britton, Brown, Hoffman Trails and Ridgewood all have room for over 100 additional students each. I think there's a couple of things going on here. One is that the report is probably in error -- I suspect that not every elementary school has capacity for exactly 600 kids. The buildings widely differ in size, from 70,000 square feet at Britton Elementary (which was built to be a middle school) to 44,000 square feet at J.W. Reason, so it is unlikely that they each have the same capacity in terms of students. It's probably just laziness in generating the report, because they're not used to anyone looking at this level of detail. The other is that the folks who live in Ballantrae, one of the most affluent neighborhoods in our district, just want a neighborhood school. After all, it's nearly 5 whole miles from the center of Ballantrae to the Norwich elementary, which currently serves Ballantrae. Norwich is one of the more full buildings, with only 38 empty seats (if the report is accurate). But note that Norwich is full in part because it is an alternative school, and there is a waiting list for students who want to attend school there. Could we not shift some of the Ballantrae kids to Hoffman Trails? One would think so, but there's something else about Hoffman Trails: this school is in the attendance area for Memorial Middle School and Darby High School, while Norwich, and I'm sure a new Ballantrae Elementary, feed into Weaver and Davidson. Are the Ballantrae folks worried about their kids going to Darby? I'm a little concerned that Hilliard is being sorted into, quite literally, the good side of the tracks, and the not-so-good side. Update July 3, 2006: The School Board was informed last week at their 'retreat' that the construction schedule for Ballantrae Elementary has been delayed by several months, and the reason given for the delay was difficulties in getting the City of Dublin to approve the plans. I suspect that the underlying issue is that some residents of Ballantrae -- having won the privilege of having an elementary school constructed in their subdivision, are now objecting to the plan to have Eiterman Rd become a through street, running between Rings Rd and Shier Rings Rd. Their hope was that Ballantrae would be accessible only via roads within Ballantrae, ignoring the fact that students from a broader area would likely be attending Ballantrae Elementary, and arriving by school bus. Nor did they consider that emergency vehicles need direct access to the school site, without having to wind through development streets. |
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