When a school district must set out to revise or create new school boundaries, the result can be a challenge to say the least when dealing with the community.
This can be especially true for transportation. As pointed out in this month’s American Association of School Administrator’s “Spotlight,” Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa, Fla., was prepared to deal with any potential complaints when it established new high school boundaries prior to the 2008-2009 school year.
According to author William Lazarus, CEO of SeerAnalytics, the company was retained by Hillsborough to “reduce the emotion from the process and optimize efficiency.” This included no usage of maps until optimal boundary solutions were found. As Lazarus puts it, “Based on which criteria and decision-making rules do we want to develop the boundaries?”
This approach did not release to the general public how certain households or neighborhoods would be affected or how sub-divisions might be split until the district, school board members and the community agreed upon the best solution.
The result was that community values drove the decision making instead of measures that some could construe as partial and unfair while also realizing cost savings. For transportation alone, district reduced its annual transportation costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Diversity also increased by as much as 11 percent at some schools, with only a 2 percent increase in the cost of transportation at those sites. And the district won one of 10 federally-funded demonstration project grants to develop new boundaries for the district’s middle schools.
How different or similar is this to how redistricting is done in your area?
