New start times, boundaries for St. Louis Park schools

Come this fall, many St. Louis Park school students will find themselves starting their school day at a different time and perhaps going to a new school.

The changes to school start times and boundaries, approved last week by the St. Louis Park school board, were triggered by the board's recent decision to close two buildings and move all sixth-graders to the junior high school.

Eliot Community Center and Cedar Manor Intermediate Center will close at the end of this school year, and all elementary schools will become K-5 programs next fall. The main reason for the changes is to save money.

However, another driving force behind the district's move to redraw boundaries for the first time in a decade is to balance the concentration of poor, minority and English language learners across all elementary schools.

"They wanted to make each school equal across the board," said Sara Thompson, a district spokeswoman.

Faced with seven different options for changing the boundaries, the board chose a plan that will create similar enrollments at the district's four elementary schools: 478 students at Aquila Elementary, 514 at Peter Hobart, 512 at Susan Lindgren Elementary, and 531 at Park Spanish Immersion.

Thompson said the plan also reduces the concentration of poor students at Aquila Elementary -- as indicated by the number qualifying for a free-or-reduced-price lunch -- from 55 percent to 39.5 percent. In the process, Peter Hobart's portion of free-and-reduced-price-lunch students would increase from 30 to 38 percent, and Susan Lindgren's would go from 32 percent to 34 percent. Park Spanish Immersion's total would hold steady at about 11 percent.

Michael Salzer, a parent of two children at Peter Hobart Elementary, said he agrees with the board's objective but not with its decision to solve it by changing boundaries.

"I'm supportive of the decision to go with sixth-grade up [in junior high]. What the consultants proposed was variations as to how to implement it," Salzer said.

"Some of the variations were to move some schools and their educational formats, and the school board disregarded all that and went right to boundaries."

Salzer said his children will remain at Peter Hobart next fall under the plan. But he argued that the option board members chose does not go far enough to balance the schools, and that means they will almost certainly have to redo the boundaries soon.

"Sixty percent of the wealth is on the east side of the city, according to the consultant," Salzer said. "All they did was move a few people in the middle of the city."

High school students will start 30 minutes later and end 30 minutes later, giving them more time to sleep. Middle-school students will begin 10 minutes later. But students at all elementary schools except Park Spanish Immersion will start 25 minutes later -- at 9:15 a.m.

Park Spanish Immersion will start at 8:25 a.m. This will allow the district to change bus routes and put the Spanish Immersion students on the same buses as the high schoolers -- a move that has raised some concerns among parents, Thompson acknowledged.