Proposal to redraw school lines hits home

To Jennifer Keeling, whose three children attend school in St. Paul Park, a hectic debate over new attendance boundaries in the district might be drifting from the big picture.

"The biggest thing that everybody's forgetting is the education of kids," said Keeling, who thinks that providing equal learning opportunities in south Washington County should be more important than whether students have to change schools.

And a Woodbury parent, Tonya Dolezal, thinks the discussion is breaking down into neighborhood disputes because it's taking too long: "It's very divisive, I find. To continue to drag it out is making kids more anxious, making adults more angry."

The board of the South Washington County Schools this week will get its first look at the most ambitious remapping proposals in years.

Overcrowding in some schools, coupled with the 2009 opening of a third high school and changes in how lower grades are configured, led to the decision to change boundaries.

Over the past year, hundreds of parents attended 18 public meetings.

From those, a citizen task forces forged three plans -- red, white and blue -- that board members will review in a work session on Thursday. Four public forums will follow.

"I think people came to the meetings very specifically thinking of their family situations," said Barb Brown, communications director for the district. "It will be absolutely impossible to satisfy everyone in their quest for what they see as best for their kids."

The district, the sixth-largest in Minnesota, has 16,800 students.

Keeling, like many parents, wants more socio-economic diversity in her children's schools. To her, that means importing more students from richer neighborhoods into St. Paul Park schools and involving more parents willing to contribute to extracurricular activities.

But parents who want their children to attend schools close to home have their reasons, too, such as the expense of driving to after-school activities. And to many students, school loyalty and sticking with friends remain most important.

Superintendent Tom Nelson said that rapid housing development on the east side of the district -- and overcrowding in the north -- is forcing changes because the district has most of its schools on the west side.

He reminds residents that many students have attended schools in cities other than their own since the school district began in the 1950s. For example, Newport students attend schools in Woodbury and Cottage Grove, while students living in Woodbury attend schools in Newport and Cottage Grove.

And Woodbury has grown so fast that the district doesn't have enough seats in that city's two junior high schools for all of the Woodbury students.

"That's part of the emotion that goes into this," said Dave Bernhardson, principal on special assignment for the district, in describing the difficulty in balancing enrollments with family wishes.

The district wants to keep neighborhoods together wherever possible, Brown said. "We tried very hard not to move kids who had been repeatedly moved in the past," she said.

Another Woodbury parent, Michelle Witte, said many Woodbury students already attend schools outside the city, including in other districts. "Everybody's going to feel the pain of change," said Witte, who has a daughter at Lake Junior High in Woodbury and another at Crestview Elementary in Cottage Grove. Overall, the boundary planning has been good, she said, except for territorial disputes.

"An unfortunate result is somehow this notion that we're not one community," she said.

The red, white and blue plans offer the school board "choices," Brown said, and vary in boundaries and the number of students who would be moved to new schools. The district officials wanted to reduce time spent on school buses, to leave space for more students near schools where more housing is being built, and to limit future changes.

The plans also have elementary and middle school components. Starting in the fall of 2009, the district's 14 elementary schools will go to a K-5 configuration and the four junior high schools will become middle schools with grades 6-8. In addition, a third high school, East Ridge, will open on Woodbury's south side. Planners will present a separate high school plan to the school board, Brown said.

Dolezal thinks the school board should decide on a plan that's most cost-effective for the district and get on with it. And Witte hopes the school board doesn't mix and match plans after all the community work put into them.

"To use a sports analogy, people are bummed when they lose the game but [the issue] hangs around if they think it wasn't reffed fairly," she said.

School board member Leslee Boyd, who lives in Woodbury, said she's received many messages and "everyone has a very heartfelt reason" for how they want boundaries to be drawn. "I would expect any boundary discussion to be somewhat controversial," she said.

Kevin Giles • 651-298-1554