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Has anyone on here been the subject of a school redistricting during their K-12 school career (or had children who were)? If so, what was your/your children's experience when forced to change schools? (Also was it strictly quantitative such as school opening/closure/balancing/overcrowding-relief, or was it a case such as racial integration?)
Has anyone on here been the subject of a school redistricting during their K-12 school career (or had children who were)? If so, what was your/your children's experience when forced to change schools? (Also was it strictly quantitative such as school opening/closure/balancing/overcrowding-relief, or was it a case such as racial integration?)
Our suburb has grown too fast for the population, so new schools are built and redistricting happens frequently due to this here. I know families who moved in at the wrong time whose children went to 4 different elementary schools in 5 years. This is not generally works reasonably if a large group of children are moving together, but not if it is only a few students from a particular school or area.
We have been fortunate to keep our grandchildren in the same school from k thru 4th grade only transitioning to middle school and jr. high.
We never had redistricting for integration as the housing is quite integrated here.
Our schools redistrict to balance enrollment numbers.
The transition happens smoothly for the kids when the parents don't over-react.
Exactly.
The kids will take a cue from the parents.
Our school system has had a couple of controversial rezonings because of growth, and I have seen normally sane friends of ours go batsh*t crazy over it. We're talking nonstop ranting and raving with threatening letters to the superintendent and passionate speeches to the school board.
One couple in particular made the high school their son was to be rezoned to sound like a portal to hell. He is scheduled to graduate from there next year as an honor student. I guess once they actually visited and saw that it was a good school, they decided it was OK to let him go there.
Other friends switched their kids to private school. I also have friends whose children who graduated from different high schools. They all got good educations and lived to tell the tale.
i spent the first 9 years of my schooling in an all white school .. when came time for me to attend high school the zones were changed and i was put in a school with 75 % blacks ..i had never seen a black person before except when my school played a school in sports that had black players .. i was not raised racist but sort of became such of my own free will .. i chose to attend high school in another state where the school was 99 % white ..silly now but such was my way of thinking in 1970.
Has anyone on here been the subject of a school redistricting during their K-12 school career (or had children who were)? If so, what was your/your children's experience when forced to change schools? (Also was it strictly quantitative such as school opening/closure/balancing/overcrowding-relief, or was it a case such as racial integration?)
Yup. I attended three different Jr. high schools because of redistricting. I attended each Jr. high that fed to the three high schools. Interestingly, I didn't go to the high school that my last middle school fed into. They had one more redistricting between grades 9 and 10 so I ended up back at the high school for the middle school I first attended.
This affected me in that I had few friends who went to all three schools with me. I didn't know many people in my high school but the flip side is I had friends in all three high schools. I would rather have simply stayed with the same group but that didn't happen. At one point they actually had us in AM/PM schedules with 6th and 7th grades attending from 6AM - 12 PM and 8th and 9th attending from 12:00 to 6:00 PM. That was the year before the new middle/high school opened. I was sent there one year for 9th grade and then for some strange reason sent back to the high school I would have originally attended.
Just a few years later they closed my high school and tore it down. There was a bubble of kids that came through that busted the schools at the seams and I was in the middle of it. Once it passed they no longer needed three high schools.
I did. They changed the lines because one of the high schools, a football powerhouse with powerful alumni, wanted a kid who lived on my street to play for the school.
It gave me the chance to go to a much better school with a rich history of academic and athletic excellence. Someone used a Magic Marker to draw new lines on a map and Boom! I was at an elite high school. It was awesome.
Last edited by DewDropInn; 05-17-2015 at 05:17 PM..
I think it sounds pretty awful. My son is finishing up elementary school and just won a school wide award. Many of the comments came from teachers and administrators who have known him since kindergarten. I think it's sad that kids miss out on the opportunity to be a part of a particular school community for that whole time like that.
I live in an area that has take a different approach than redistricting to balance numbers. We are in an enrollment zone with 5 schools in the area, but you don't automatically get assigned to one based on where you live. You rank all 5 schools in order of where you'd like your child to go, but it's a lottery on whether you get in or not. This allows them to balance the numbers each year, but once a child enrolls at a particular school, they are guaranteed their seat at that school for the entire time.
Our schools redistrict to balance enrollment numbers.
The transition happens smoothly for the kids when the parents don't over-react.
The school district where I used to work would sometimes (no more than once every five to seven years or so) slightly change the lines. It was only done when the balance would be way off, such as one elementary school having 18 to 20 children in their classrooms and all of the others having 28 to 30 children. It happened a few times, over the years, when a big apartment complex was built. Since there is very little vacant land in the city, it may not happen again for decades.
It usually only affected a few families and since it happened so rarely it was never a big deal --- except to the few parents who would go absolutely crazy when told that their special snowflake had to change schools along with the other children in his or her neighborhood.
Our district has four elementary schools and only one middle school and one high school.
In a neighboring district they had a few more problems when they built two new VERY "top of the line" elementary schools and left two older, but still very nice elementary schools. Some parents wanted their children to attend the newest schools rather than stay in their neighborhood school.
I live in an area that has take a different approach than redistricting to balance numbers. We are in an enrollment zone with 5 schools in the area, but you don't automatically get assigned to one based on where you live. You rank all 5 schools in order of where you'd like your child to go, but it's a lottery on whether you get in or not. This allows them to balance the numbers each year, but once a child enrolls at a particular school, they are guaranteed their seat at that school for the entire time.
The school district where I live wouldn't do that because it would increase their bus expenses (having to provide transportation to multiple schools of the same level without a stronger reason). What they have done in the past though when the boundary change is designed to prevent future overcrowding is they'd let your family be "grandfathered" in where you could opt to have the kid(s) stay at the same school (until they moved on) as long as you understood that you'd be responsible for the transportation.
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