Superintendent Dr. Gary Plano announced at the Feb. 24 School Board meeting that he accepted the final recommendation submitted by the Boundary Committee for elementary school boundaries in the 2016-17 school year.
The final recommendation was the same proposal that the Boundary Committee presented at Islander Middle School in December.
In a review of the Boundary Committee process with the School Board, MISD transportation director Todd Kelsay said the numbers and data suggested that the committee should move forward with its recommendation, despite a few individual concerns from the community regarding transitioning students.
“When [the committee members] looked at some of the numbers of movement, meaning who’s going to go from school to school, they quickly realized it wasn’t going to be a single student or two that was going to find themselves amongst a sea of people they didn’t know; we were looking at very large numbers in fact,” he said.
“It’s not going to be the lone student, it’s really a lot of students that are moving. Neighborhoods are moving together, and those positives started to make the committee reaffirm their original belief, which was there will be challenges, but we’re opening up four new schools, not just one.”
MISD Chief Finance/Operations Officer Dean Mack commented that in reducing each existing building by approximately 150-170 students, tough decisions had to be made.
“The committee came to the realization that we’re moving over 500 children. There is no way on this green earth that we can move 500 children and make everybody happy,” Mack said. “They felt that they did the best job they could to minimize the impact on the families of the total Island.”
Plano said since downsizing from five elementary schools to three, the district has viewed the entire Island as a single neighborhood, which has led to the longer, 40-minute bus rides. But Plano also added the intra-district transfer policy may contemplate that any person can ask for a transfer from one school boundary to another, as long as they provide transportation and there is space available.
“We are still going to create some flexibility, it’s just not institutionalizing it by running buses in the way that we have with the labyrinth of bus routes that we have in order to do what we do,” Plano said.
Kelsay said currently, almost a third of Mercer Island elementary students are attending a school outside of their current boundary, which creates a logistical challenge for the district from a transportation standpoint.
“When I look at this and I see what the committee has recommended, I get really excited about what we’re going to be able to do going forward with busing,” Kelsay said. “I honestly think that for those students that are eligible for busing, we’ll see an increase in ridership. You got a five-and-a-half-year-old student that’s going to ride a bus for 15 minutes versus say 35. I think a lot of parents would opt for the bus in the going-forward scenario.”
Plano presented the board with a first draft of the intra-district student transfer policy, consisting of the talking points presented by Mack at the Feb. 12 board meeting. Plano noted draft refinements including the open enrollment period being named as the month of April, as well as the opening sentence of the draft stating that each elementary student in the district is expected to attend their neighborhood school. Any student may apply for transfer, subject to space, and the priority of preference would go to students who will be in fifth grade in 2016-17 school year.
Plano said the district plans to name a core team of teachers before the end of school year, who will work with Elementary No. 4 principal Aimee Batliner-Gillette on setting up the new school. Then in January or February of 2016, Plano hopes to identify K-4th grade staff at Elementary No. 4, as well as at least one fifth grade teacher, saying the district wants to see who exercises their option to remain at their elementary school before deciding how many fifth grade teachers to bring to the new school.
