Shoreline School District parents and staff will have seven boundary proposals they can learn about and comment on at a public forum to be held April 24 on proposed elementary school boundary changes.
The district’s Boundary and Transportation Committee, or BTAC, narrowed down preferred plans from 10 to seven at its April 17 meeting this week.
The committee has been meeting to find ways to redraw elementary school boundaries to redistribute students because of recent changes in the elementary landscape.
Two elementary schools, Sunset and North City, will close, and two alternative programs, the Room Nine Community School and Home Education Exchange, will move. (See related story.)
The district aimed to put the seven proposals on its Web site by today, Friday, April 20.
At the forum next week, maps of the proposals will line the walls or be spread on tables. For the first hour, people will look at maps and ask questions of boundary committee members sitting at tables.
The second hour will be an open comment period.
Comments can also be made by sending e-mail to committee members.
The input will be tabulated, said Linda Gohlke, who co-chairs the boundary committee.
The group will reconvene two days later, on April 26, to finalize its recommendations based on the public input.
At the group’s meeting earlier this week, the walls were covered with maps of the different plans the group was considering.
Committee members listed pros and cons of each plan and those thoughts were presented to the group.
Some pros and cons were based on public input already received, for example, the request to keep special education students at Highland Terrace Elementary and the request to keep Sunset students who live further north together.
At the meeting, there were several aspects of plans the group considered pros or cons.
Cons included having to bus students who now walk to school, moving the self-contained special education program from Highland Terrace, bussing students across Aurora Avenue, sending North City students to four different schools, splitting up students who live in the Westminster Triangle area and making moves that would imply higher transportation costs.
Other cons included splitting off a small group of ELL students from other Sunset students and overloading Meridian Park Elementary with special programs.
Based on an analysis of pros and cons like these, three plans were removed from consideration.
One concern in remaining plans is maxing out Highland Terrace and Syre Elementary Schools. Plans that keep Sunset students from crossing Aurora Avenue put those two schools at maximum capacity.
If Sunset students go only to those two schools, self-contained special programs housed there would have to move.
One committee member described that option as “way too tight.”
All seven plans included moving Room Nine to Meridian Park Elementary, an option Room Nine parents have protested.
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