So you think Chapel Hill schools avoid redistricting??? (Carrboro: apartments, transporting)

[IADINNC]

Okay - I will jump into the fray as a 10 year resident of Northwoods.
Both of my daughters will have completed elementary school at Seawell next year.
For me, I don't want to see our nbhd moved to the new school because first and most importantly, I love the school. It is a warm, nurturing environment. Our principal, Marney Rubin, was recognized by the district as the Principal of the Year. They organize food drives for Seawell families who are in need over the winter break, have backpack and school supply donations for the kids in need ,an annual celebration of different cultures every May, the Critter Corner that has chickens, rabbits, and goats. The teachers are wonderful. The community of Northwoods, Parkside, and Larkspur centers around the school. We have watched our children grow and thrive there. All of these reasons are more important to mean than EOG scores, transportation hassles, and making my commute to work easier. The place will always have a soft spot my heart.

[poppydog]

But it's not like the other elementary schools don't have all that stuff and similar other great things, too! My child's school, Carrboro Elementary, organizes food drives and help for the families in need including a Cubs helping Cubs list serve, has a Christmas tree with paper ornaments for giving gifts to kids at the school in need (anonymously of course), celebrates different cultures with an international festival, has a school fair, has chickens and a school garden, our principal was named principal of the year in 2010, one of our teachers was named International Educator of the Year, has many other wonderful teachers, and a vibrant and very diverse community. However, although we really like our school, we're not afraid to try something new. Northside is NOT a "bad" school — it's a brand new school with a great principal from Estes Hills. That's what we know right now. It's going to be a great building, LEED gold certified, and I'm sure that it will be a great community also.

[charge8head]

A couple of things you're missing out:
- it's not inconvenience but rather uprooting for Northwood, Larkspur, Parkside and Rigsby Park. Instead of the current 13 minute drive which is district-wide average, it's going to be 35+ minutes each way ! This may be ok for Raleigh but not for Chapel Hill. The added traffic adds congestion for all residents and wastes money and carbon footprint as well.

- the plan's data on the students who'll move are only projections and should be taken with a grain of salt. One set of data that is easy to verify are distances though. Even taking District's mileage data, despite of mistakes there, you can tell that plan 4 has fewer student-miles than the other three. Plan 4 moves nominally more students but they all have shorter distances.

- District's plans are not optimized but rather hand-drawn. District could have gotten support from statisticians and professionals from local universities or business: SAS, Spotfire, you name it but chose instead a simplistic hand solution. There's a proposed plan 1B from the neighbors that modifies plan 1 and produces much better data and moves fewer student and student-miles. Let's see if the District will present it to the Board.

- Since you and your family embraced desegregation see how plans 1,2,3 create a segregated school with racial and ethnic minorities in downtown. Ask for the projected racial makeup of Northside and compare it to other schools. Also, desegregation was law mandated and applied to the whole city not limited to one neighborhood...

As for the comments that people move in when children are 4 and then out by high school you're talking about 14 years if there's only one kind. Check with a real estate agent what's the typical turnaround. I wonder if you're not confusing this with apartments or suggesting that we should marry the house.

[poppydog]

Originally Posted by charge8head

A couple of things you're missing out:
- it's not inconvenience but rather uprooting for Northwood, Larkspur, Parkside and Rigsby Park.

This is just hyperbole. Any neighborhood that has to change schools is going experience the same thing. Your neighborhood's relationship to its current school is NOT more special than all the other neighborhoods subject to redistricting. This is the kind of thing that is really turning me off this segment's argument in favor of plan 4.

As far as the drive time, I'm sure you're talking about busing here. For car commuters I think it's about 10 minutes. This is somewhat of a valid complaint, but somebody has to have the longest ride on the bus. I have a friend whose kids ride the bus to Carrboro Elementary from their neighborhood in town about 2 miles from school and their bus ride is about 30-35 minutes long.

I'm not sure what you mean by the plan's data only being projections. Can you elaborate? I'm sure their data is only projections at any time. They don't know which kids may move, go to private school, parents might get divorced and split custody in different districts, etc, etc.

Originally Posted by charge8head

Plan 4 moves nominally more students but they all have shorter distances.

This is by far your strongest point and the one that has the most merit IMO. If you want to convince others concentrate on this line.

As far as the plans not being optimized, I'm a little confused about what you're trying to say. They have been modifying plans as they go along (so now we have plan 1.2 instead of 1.0). The message I have gotten is they are open to input from the community and there is still the potential for modifications to the plans.

I'm not sure where you're getting the racial make-up of Northside. The data released by CHCCS on their website has the SES and the at risk students. Plan 2 in particular offers the most even distribution across SES and the at risk population according to the data provided. For background info on desegregation in schools in North Carolina and throughout the South and the nation check out April 20, 1971 | Supreme Court Rules That Busing Can Be Used to Integrate Schools - NYTimes.com .

The distance for everyone argument is the strongest one you've got, but for 74a the distance is not that much more. I haven't seen the bus routes, but I know that Jim Ellis, the director of transportation, has driven all the proposed routes. Using google maps, if I map from Macrae Ct in the middle of 74A to Northside, it's 3.7miles. From Macrae Ct to Seawell it's 2.7 miles. From Macrae to Morris Grove it's 3.4 miles. From MacRae to Estes Hills it's 2.9 miles and fwiw, from Macrae to Scroggs it's 6.6 miles and to Rashkis it's 10.2 miles.

So when I hear that 74a would be happy to go to Morris Grove because it's closer, I'm scratching my head wondering if .3 miles really makes that much difference. Likewise when I hear that they'd be happy to go to Estes Hills when the Estes Hills principal is moving to Northside, again I'm scratching my head wondering what's up with that. I'm starting to wonder now if maybe they just don't want to go to school in the Northside neighborhood. You say they love Seawell so much and it's such a great school, but we all love our schools.

If you say, plan 4 moves the most kids, but reduces travel time for everyone across the district then that makes sense and makes it not all about 74a, but about what you think is best for the district as a whole. It takes away from that argument, though, that plan 4 just flip flops 74a and 91 (the apartments at Timberlyne across MLK/Airport) and sends 91 to Northside. If anyone from 74a has advocated for 91 and other similar segments to go to their neighborhood schools I haven't heard that.

Half the kids in Northside have been going across town to Rashkis and the other half has been going to Carrboro Elementary and I do think that's a terrible shame to split the neighborhood like that. I also think that's too far for them to go and I am really glad that that neighborhood which has been going through so much with gentrification and has a history of poverty, but a strong community is getting a school in it once again. I do hope that it will solidify the neighborhood. If the plans were splitting Parkside or Northwoods in half I would not be in favor of that, either, but if whole neighborhoods are moving en masse, it's not so bad.

[huckdisc]

I think it's critical that when we talk about distance that we talk about time rather than mileage. For those of us in the 157's, a switch to Scroggs would be a 5 minute car ride with 2 traffic lights requiring about 30 seconds on 15-501 south. Conversely, travelling to Northside is 11 traffic lights and at least triple the time by car. I can only imagine a bus trying to navigate it. As one of the neighborhoods with the earliest pickups (going to FPG) at 6:50, our elementary kids would be forced to catch the bus closer to 6:30 and would be subjected to the whims of the traffic patterns and upcoming construction on S. Columbia and Smith Level.

It seems unethical to subject children to the risks associated with spending so much time on the bus (tardiness, bullying, accidents) exemplified in plans 1-3, when plan 4 already meets the stated goals of board policy code 4150 regarding redistricting for equitable schools. Specifically:

1. SES variability is reduced by 30% (which is the greatest reduction seen in any plan)
2. At risk student variability is reduced by 42%
3. Math score variability is reduced by 21%
4. And, Reading score variability is reduced by 37%

To me, these are solid progressive steps forward that benefit the entire district as a whole.

[michgc]

I don't have a dog in this particular fight as we are in Scroggs now and are staying in Scroggs, but I sympathize with people who are getting moved, especially to faraway schools. The early start time of the schools does not help matters any. I think it is plain cruel for young kids to have to get on a bus at 6:50 AM - that is way too early! And it is especially unfair that that pickup time is a whole hour before school starts. I cannot imagine making them get on the bus at 6:30! I guess it will force a lot of parents to drive to school. We have a neighborhood right behind us, literally a few blocks from my house that will be going to Northside. They are just outside the Southern Village boundaries (Culbreth Ridge and Cobble Ridge developments). They could walk to Scroggs! I would be very annoyed if that were us. What neighborhood is 157?

I am fairly new to this town and am not too familiar with the different boundaries. I am a strong proponent of neighborhood schools, so I will give the district credit for keeping neighborhoods together, but I hate looking at the map and seeing the colors all over the place. I know they do it for SES reasons, but I hate how they have blue here, blue there, blue over there. And what is even worse is what my old school district used to call "attendance islands" which is a certain neighborhood going to a specific school, yet surrounded by neighborhoods going to a different school. I know there is no good answer at the population grows. However, I do wonder why they didn't make the new school the Spanish magnet school and keep FPG as is? Many of the neighborhoods in southern Chapel Hill are pretty close to FPG but will be a hike to Northside (thinking about above neighborhoods plus other neighborhoods along Culbreth and Heritage Hills neighborhood). Although I do think the facility will be much nice at Northside than FPG, which is pretty awful, in my opinion.

[charge8head]

All SES, Math and Reading scores are projections in the sense that district doesn't know for sure who'll come and the data isn't very much reliable either. Test scores are applicable only to 3rd graders since 4th graders are grandfathered and 5th graders leave for middle school. SES data are just numbers 1 to 4 assigned to whole segments; ex all apartments are 1. Not particularly accurate... I've no idea where At-Risk data come from. They only said it's not "free and reduced lunch" since that is not permitted to be used. This leaves the only distance as a reliable indicator.

You say that they test-drove the routes. If so they didn't publish, let alone commit to, times or routes. Even current bus schedules vanished from the web site. One thing I heard was to route 74A through Seawell Rd. That would take even longer.

Look at the student's best interest: all busses currently start picking up students around 7:13 for 74A. Plans 1-3 would make it 6:45am. Similarly on return. They'll be spending time in bus instead of soccer, baseball and the like. I hear Raleigh parents are saving on babysitting because kids are scheduled to be in busses anyway. Is that what we want? I understand that with redistricting some schedules change but going over double the current bus times should be a non starter.

The distance metric should be weighed not by students moved but by student x miles moved. Bus driving minutes would be even better. Let's say plan A moves 300 students from a nearby school to an equally far away school. Plan B which moves only 10 students but from a nearby school to a faraway one. Yet if you simply compare students moved you'd vote for plan B which is clearly not working for the best interest of the students.

When I say plans are not optimized I meant no software for Mathematical optimization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia was used. With 160 (?) segments and 11 schools the number of possible choices gets astronomical, even with the given space constraints. Setting out clear criteria what you want to maximize gives a better solution.

As one white parent said it in the public meeting his child was in minority in the kindergarten. Plan 4 would get the mostly asian kids from 074A and put them in the Northside school together with other minorities there. Segregation forever for the sake of averages?

[poppydog]

They answered the question about making Northside a spanish magnet early on. When they chose to locate the school in Northside they made a commitment to keeping it a neighborhood school, which I think is the right choice. It's a historically black neighborhood and the new school is located on the site of the former segregated Northside school. The neighborhood has been through some rough times and is trying to hold off the forces of gentrification and converted student housing. Siting the school there is one part of the town's approach to helping the neighborhood stay together. To make it the Spanish magnet would defeat the purpose of locating the school there. There are a lot of houses around the school that will be able to walk to it much like So Vill can walk to Scroggs. In contrast, FPG is not in a neighborhood and is not as walkable. Kids who live on the west have to contend with crossing Smith Level Rd and kids who live to the north have to contend with not only Smith Level, but also 54.

One thing I would like to see rectified with all these plans is the dual language assignments. My neighborhood is currently districted for Carrboro Elementary. About half the kids in our segment do the dual language program. In 3 of the plans we stay at Carrboro (in one plan we go to Northside), but the dual language kids are assigned to FPG. Could they not arrange it so the dual language kids could go to Carrboro, too? (For those following along at home, but not in the game, they are making FPG a Spanish dual language magnet, but also keeping two classes per grade level of magnet dual language at Carrboro).

huckdisc, I drive from north of downtown to south of 157 to Chatham nearly every day and it takes me about 15 minutes. From 157 to Northside would be shorter, probably more like 10. The lights aren't usually a huge problem, although the construction may hold things up. Hopefully they will be done before school starts in the fall no matter which plan they choose.

[michgc]

Originally Posted by poppydog

They answered the question about making Northside a spanish magnet early on. When they chose to locate the school in Northside they made a commitment to keeping it a neighborhood school, which I think is the right choice. It's a historically black neighborhood and the new school is located on the site of the former segregated Northside school. The neighborhood has been through some rough times and is trying to hold off the forces of gentrification and converted student housing. Siting the school there is one part of the town's approach to helping the neighborhood stay together. To make it the Spanish magnet would defeat the purpose of locating the school there. There are a lot of houses around the school that will be able to walk to it much like So Vill can walk to Scroggs. In contrast, FPG is not in a neighborhood and is not as walkable. Kids who live on the west have to contend with crossing Smith Level Rd and kids who live to the north have to contend with not only Smith Level, but also 54.

Thanks for that explanation. That makes sense. I obviously wasn't following along from the beginning since I didn't live here.

I agree with you about the dual language kids. If the general ed kids go to Carrboro, then the dual language kids should, too. Perhaps it's just something they overlooked? I also think they should look into starting elementary school later. I would be royally mad if my kid had to get on a bus at 6:45 AM. As it is I hate that I have to WAKE them at 6:45. But we're just night owls over here.

Re-districting always brings out the worst in people it seems. No matter what, there is no way to satisfy everyone, which is why I generally like small school districts, as there is less variance among schools for people to get so mad about. When dealing with public school, I guess we should take a cue from the students' mantra in school, "You get what you get, and you don't get upset."

[CHTransplant]

Originally Posted by charge8head

As one white parent said it in the public meeting his child was in minority in the kindergarten. Plan 4 would get the mostly asian kids from 074A and put them in the Northside school together with other minorities there. Segregation forever for the sake of averages?

Some of the families in 074A are Asian, and many Asian families are not in 074A. Hardly segregation.

Originally Posted by poppydog

huckdisc, I drive from north of downtown to south of 157 to Chatham nearly every day and it takes me about 15 minutes. From 157 to Northside would be shorter, probably more like 10. The lights aren't usually a huge problem, although the construction may hold things up. Hopefully they will be done before school starts in the fall no matter which plan they choose.

The S. Columbia project is scheduled to be complete in July 2014.