The school board is in the process of revising its boundary adjustment policy

Arlington School Board members will consider a major overhaul of how the school system handles boundary adjustments in mid-November.

If it passes, school leaders will look into it boundaries a two-year cycle instead of the current five years, and will apply a new set of criteria to determine how to achieve this.

A public hearing and possible approval of policy changes are scheduled for Thursday, November 14.

The personnel proposalwhich has already undergone two rounds of public comment, represents a major change in some ways.

“Very little of the existing language has actually been retained — most of it is new,” said Steven Marku, the school system’s director of policy and legislation.

He briefed school council members and answered questions on Tuesday (October 29).

Marku said the draft policy does not provide for an endless series of border adjustments.

“Border changes are not expected to occur every two years. We just want to evaluate it every two years,” he said.

Under the proposal, boundary adjustments would generally be limited to schools that are 15% over or 15% under capacity. Currently, only a handful of provincial schools are eligible.

Four criteria are proposed to guide decision-making on future border adjustments. In descending order of importance and as described by the school system, these are:

• Efficiency: “Utilizing school capacity to minimize current and future capital and operating costs.”
• Proximity: “Encouraging the relationship between schools and the community by assigning students to schools near their home, taking into account walking distance, school bus times and costs, and walking safety.”
• Alignment: “Minimizing the number of schools where each cohort of students from an individual school progresses to the next level, as much as is practically feasible.”
• Demographics: “Promoting diversity in our school communities and paying attention to how the proposed change affects student groups.”

“As we make our decisions, these are the factors we apply and the relative weights we believe are important,” said school board President Mary Kadera.

The existing border adjustment policy has six criteria and does not rank them by priority. That has meant that communities may nitpick proposed boundary changes in an attempt to achieve the desired end result.

For decades, Arlington’s efforts to change boundaries have drawn boundaries emotional responses from parents. Some work behind the scenes to achieve a specific outcome, even though the final outcome may not necessarily be the best for the entire community.

Having tiered criteria should help the process by establishing ground rules for decision-making, said board member Bethany Sutton. She noted that there were “past issues where people felt like they hadn’t been heard.”

The proposal also stipulates that no student living in the same home would have to change schools more than once at each of the three school levels: elementary, middle and high school.

Marku said that while that language means a student within those levels might have to transfer three times over the course of 13 years of schooling, such a scenario is “highly unlikely.”