Redistricting angst at W-JCC school meeting

It’s June 17. The pros and cons of redistricting consumed most of the school board’s three hour meeting Tuesday night. James City County’s EDA approves up to $222.3 million in bonds to pay for government center and other projects. Community Foundation distributes more than $300,000 in scholarships

Parents, students protest redistricting plans at Tuesday's W-JCC school board meeting. (Williamsburg Watch pictures)

Editor’s Note — we added a paragraph that explains the superintendent’s proposal to create a focus group.

Redistricting commanded the majority of the Williamsburg-James City County school board’s meeting Tuesday night, as parents pushed back and board members agonized over the conflicting goals they need to meet.

Parents and students who have responded to surveys since the redistricting maps were released last month said their primary goal was to keep their children in their local schools with minimum impact to their neighborhoods.

The school administration is working through a broader set of issues that include keeping some schools in faster developing areas from being overcrowded, ensuring buses run on time, and keeping schools racially diverse. The biggest challenge, school staff explained, is that most of the population growth and development is occurring in certain areas, particularly in northern James City County, leaving some schools overcrowded and others underused.

That means “people have to move,” Board Chair Andrea M. Donnor said, noting her own daughter is upset that the first pass at redistricting meant she would not be able to stay with her school friends.

The board spent 40 minutes hearing from 20 people – most criticizing redistricting – at the beginning of the meeting. Several residents from the Wellington and Ford’s Colony neighborhoods complained their school attendance zones were being split up to send kids to schools further away.

The school board then spent another 90 minutes reviewing the history of the redistricting process, which began more than three years ago.

Superintendent Daniel Keever said redistricting became inevitable when the school system and local governments agreed to build two new prekindergarten “Bright Beginnings” schools to handle more students.

That meant 30 classrooms currently used at five elementary schools for the program would become vacant next school year, allowing those schools to stop using modular classrooms. But that also meant school populations would need tweaking to keep some schools from being underused while others were overcrowded.

Redistricting is “not something that has crept up on us,” Keever said. “It is something that we have talked about fairly consistently over the last three years or more.”

Donnor said that based on emails the board received, “there is a sentiment in the community that we are resegregating schools.”

But school staff explained that the percentage of minority and lower income students increased in some schools largely because their overall population went down, not because more minorities were being shifted in.

Keever said the school system would shift resources to schools that had the highest number of students getting reduced priced lunches to make sure they had enough staff support and smaller student to teacher ratios. But at smaller schools there simply aren’t enough classrooms to handle lower pupil to teacher ratios, unless students are moved to other schools.

In response to parental protests, Keever said he would be asking the committee spearheading the redistricting work to review its maps to try to minimize large increases in one demographic group in schools, give a clear rationale when one neighborhood is divided into multiple school zones, and try to keep students together as they advance in grades.

He also proposed creating what he called a “focus group” a group of 13 members — nine of them parents — to review the work of the committee . But school board members rejected that idea as an additional layer of bureaucracy that could create confusion if there was disagreement.

Keever said the entire consultant report on redistricting was now available on the school web site. He said the individual responses to the last survey on the matter would be available by June 30, and a revised map would be presented at the Aug. 4 meeting.

The last word in the public comment session went to local retiree Jay Everson, who tried to reassure parents “our kids can adapt. They can make new friends....They can adapt if the parents will just tell their kids you have a new opportunity here, take advantage of it.”