When districts are redistricting and making changes to their grade configuration, it is important to let the public know why the decisions are being made.
“Transparency matters,” Danville Independent Superintendent Keith Look said. “The district and the LPC (local planning committee) have to be very clear with what is driving the decision-making process. What has initiated the issue, what are potentially the non-negotiable factors involved, and what are the intended outcomes.
“A lot of times this work is driven more by a financial or a facility matter than it is often instructional at the initial part of it. That’s not true everywhere, but by and large it becomes an easier conversation to start when you know you have to make some significant change based on finances or facilities.”
He said once a district begins the process, it can be turned into a positive by asking, “What kind of outcomes do we feel we would want to see our district with a greater focus or effort or commitment to? That, then, is where you start to see conversations result that create buy-in and engagement.”
Matt Thompson, Montgomery County Schools superintendent, said when a district is considering changes, it is important to develop guiding principles for the process and ask “what do they firmly believe?”
“If they can articulate those as a district and then stick to those during the process, when those decisions need to be made it becomes a whole lot easier to help the community see that while they may not always agree with a very specific decision, at least they should be able to see how that decision was a byproduct of being consistent with the guiding principles,” Thompson said.
During his own district’s process, he said district leaders knew they needed to keep enough bonding potential for future building projects and that the changes needed to be sustainable, both from a programmatic standpoint and a financial standpoint.
When it came time to tackle the redistricting to go from three elementary schools to four, the Montgomery County district had four guiding principles:
1. Impact as few families as possible.
2. Target an enrollment at each elementary school between 500 and 600 students.
3. Ensure that each elementary school population looks as demographically similar as possible.
4. Be committed to providing drafts of the redistricting plan to the community and families that were potentially impacted, and provide opportunities for feedback.
The district had an interactive map (see image above) on its website where community members could see which elementary school their child would attend.
“The concerning part for most people is how does this decision impact my kid and my family specifically, so when you think about that, the part that most closely affects them is the redistricting,” Thompson said. “Redistricting, I think, was the concern in the back of everybody’s mind.”