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Mar. 10, 2010
By Stephen Schmidt
NORTH LIBERTY LEADER
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Audience members gathered around scenario maps after they were posted at the Redistricting Meeting on Feb. 25.
(Stephen Schmidt) |
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IOWA CITY- Maybe there won't end up being a third high school in the Iowa City School District after all.
During its meeting last Thursday night, the Iowa City redistricting committee received two new scenarios titled "3A" and "3B" from redistricting consultants RSP & Associates. In 3A, the consultants provided a two high school, four junior high school model for dealing with growing enrollment; in 3B a third high school would be built, but it would begin as a ninth-grade center before slowly growing into a high school as required by enrollment, with the option to remain a ninth and tenth-grade center if necessary.
Superintendent Lane Plugge said in the case of 3A, the fourth junior high would likely be located somewhere in the southwest area of the district, and all four junior highs would contain seventh through ninth-graders.
"You wouldn't need a third high school if that happened," Plugge said.
Under this scenario, when the fourth junior high opened in 2012-13, the populations at City High and West High would both drop to between 1,200 and 1,300 students.
Scenario 3A marked the first time in six committee meetings that RSP provided a scenario that did not eventually lead to third high school being built in the district.
Rob Schwarz, owner and principal planner of RSP & Associates, said this decision was based on input that they have received through the process, including two well-attended public forums on the issue. He hypothesized that slowing growth in the area might be affecting public opinion.
"When you're growing fast, it's easier for people to latch on to the idea that you need that new high school," he said.
In order to further refine the scenarios that the committee will send to the board, Schwarz asked the committee members to raise their hands in preliminary support for the high school scenarios they favored.
With many of the committee members voting more than once, the most popular solution- receiving roughly half of the raised hands-was to expand on to City and West High, while just under a third of committee members voted for the solutions provided by scenarios 3A and 3B. When asked if the committee should provide the school board with scenarios involving two or three high schools, a vast majority of the committee members voted yes.
Schwarz noted that if more capacity was built on to City and West, it would be even more difficult, barring any dramatic changes, to justify a third high school in the future.
"You would pretty much at that point become a two high school town," Schwarz said.
Committee member Anne Johnson, a North Liberty resident, expressed frustration with the lack of North Liberty representation on the committee, arguing that this would skew the votes. Johnson also pointed out that the school board had already given the committee the direction of charting a path to a third high school, based largely on recommendations from the previous high school task force.
"I'm concerned that we are talking about if, when we were supposed to be talking about when," Johnson said.
Coralville City Administrator Kelly Hayworth, a committee member who served on the previous task force as well, said that there was a reason the third high school's existence was always tied to sufficient enrollment and room in the budget.
"Toward the end of the task force, finances were changing, and we were starting to question whether [the third high school] really was viable," Hayworth said.
As for proposed changes for elementary schools, redistricting was the same for both scenarios. In contrast with scenario two, which split Lemme Elementary's current boundaries between five different schools - both scenario 3A and 3B split Lemme between only two areas.
In another major wrinkle, under 3A and 3B, Longfellow and Mark Twain elementary schools would become paired schools, with Twain hosting the students from Kindergarten through second grade, while Longfellow would take the same students from third through sixth grade.
Jim Behle, associate superintendent for the district, said the benefit of pairing two schools comes from the balance of demographics, such as free and reduced lunch rates.
"If you take a school with a high free and reduce lunch rate and pair it with a school that has a moderate to low rate, obviously you will balance that out," Behle said.
RSP will take the committee's input and bring revised scenarios for the committee's consideration at its meeting on Thursday, March 4. The committee is set to meet with the school board in a work session at the end of March to discuss the scenarios.
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