Crossing the Redistricting Minefield.

Defining Your Goals Can Provide Safe Passage Through a Boundary Change Process

Redistricting is like a minefield: on one side of the field the school administration rests in a safe but uncomfortable position. It knows that now or soon, it will have to act since some schools will be overloaded or imbalanced in terms of race or at risk" student groupings, and some old buildings will need to be replaced.

On the other side of the minefield is the promise of a new equilibrium. This equilibrium must be defined in terms of which school buildings will be built or enlarged and where; with what capacities; where enrollment boundaries will lie; what grade groupings will exist; and in some cases what the composition of students in each building will be.

The superintendent and the school board have to cross this minefield-a dangerous crossing because it will force students to change schools, lose old friends, and deal with new routes to school. Eruptions may occur at public hearings. But the school system's administration will be driven to redistrict by population growth and changing geographic distribution of the student population--forces so powerful they will make the existing position untenable.

To make a safe passage, administrators must do three things.

* Plan the crossing.

Never venture into a minefield without studying the experiences of those who have done it before. Experience shows that a rational process exists to deal comprehensively with this complex problem. The process includes technical and political elements by means of which potential mines can be discovered and defused.

* Prepare a comprehensive roadmap.

Be ready for the new equilibrium on the other side of that field, including identifying boundaries and building capacities.

* Carry the community along.

Persuade stakeholders not that the new design will be the best of all possible worlds, but that a good stability will be reached with minimum impact in numbers of students changing schools.

Starting Point 

In a rational redistricting process, defining goals is the first task. Staff or a citizens' group can do this. The Shenendehowa Central School District, north of Albany, N.Y., found it rewarding to have its goals developed early and by a citizens' group. In this way, although some changes in priorities had to be made, the plan was directed at what residents wanted.

The following goals adopted by school districts illustrate a range of real concerns, but each expresses a single parameter. Some have a range of possible responses, some a yes/no response.

"Avoid frequent shifts in boundaries." (Bremerton, Wash.)

"Retain neighborhood schools." (Bremerton, Wash.)

"Attempt to establish a socioeconomic percentage of poverty students in each school that represents the district 's average." (La Crosse, Wis.)

"Equalize minority enrollments in schools at district levels." (Davenport, Iowa)

"Limit non-contiguous zones, "in effect, to minimize the number of enclaves, or isolated areas within another school's enrollment area. (La Crosse, Wis.)

"Equality of building loading ... [meaning] that no segment of the public will be able to complain that its children are in a school that is more crowded than any other." (Danbury, Conn.)

Goals Statement

Direct statements such as the preceding should be incorporated within a formal document for two reasons. First, they must be comprehensive in coverage. Second, they need to be stated in terms of specific characteristics or criteria against which the performance of alternative plans can be evaluated, either quantitatively or qualitatively.

To accomplish this, goals can be organized into five major groups:

* Education objectives.

These include organization by grade groups, subsidiary grade objectives such as the number of sessions for kindergartners, and program objectives. Program objectives include the definition of programs such as special education, magnet schools, and controlled choice.

* School loading goals and fiscal goals.

These goals include desired numbers of pupils per classroom, level of use, degree of equality o loading between schools, and minimization of capital costs.

* Social goals.

These include racial/ethnic balance, income-group balance, cultural diversity, and other social goals that are deemed beneficial the education of students.

* Transportation goals.

The most commonly expressed goal in this group is the minimization of bus transportation costs. Other goals include minimizing student time in travel. Do consider the effects of special programs, such as magnet schools, on transportation costs.

* Administrative goals.

These include boundary stability over time; minimizing the number of students changing schools; and equalizing the burden boundary changes upon student of different racial and income groups.

The public should b warned that some goals conflict with others. Minimizing transportation costs, for example, may conflict with the need to achieve acceptable level of racial balance. Similarly, an "anti-enclave" policy may have to be foregone to achieve a fair distribution of students who are considered at risk of failure. If communication has been clear from the outset, the public will readily accept the fact that trade-offs must be made.

The importance attached to some goals may have to be upgraded or downgraded when their implications become known. This implies prioritizing goals and being willing to adjust priorities at a later stage in the redistricting study process.

Once the statement of goals has been prepared, management should present it to school board members, as they will want to see what is being proposed as a guide for redistricting. The authors advocate that a goal statement be approved by the school board at an early stage in redistricting. This brings policy-makers and management into agreement and provides for mutual support during all stages of the redistricting process.

By whatever process the goals statement is prepared, it should be widely disseminated to the public. It is a prime means for initiating consensus-building.

Performance Estimates

Properly framed, goals become an integral part of the complex technical process by which the performance of alternative school building and boundary scenarios can be evaluated objectively.

This process must be fast, economical, and absolutely credible to the reviewing parties-administrators, school board, parents, and, if necessary, the courts. The process must deal with multiple futures and, most importantly, with the realities of two-dimensional space.

This process must produce, accurately and in detail, estimates of present and future performance relative to specific characteristics such as equality of building loading, minimizing the number of students changing schools, or minimizing transportation costs.

Key elements in this process are:

1. Collecting data;

2. Forecasting aggregate future enrollments;

3. Forecasting the geographic locations of future enrollments;

4. Proposing alternative building scenarios;

5. Proposing alternative boundary scenarios;

6. Testing the conseqences of each combination of building/boundary scenarios; and

7. Displaying the results graphically for use in reports.

Experience shows that these steps normally require a year of intense effort. Basic mapping and geo-coding of student data takes approximately six months. Four to six months should be allocated to active work with a citizen task force.

Typically, decisions about new boundaries should be reached a month before the school year ends to allow parent notifications and changes in bus routing.

Never underestimate the abilities of citizen review groups to comprehend technical processes. They demand accuracy and reasoned conclusions. They know their neighborhoods, both physical and social. This is why so much care must go into the redistricting process and why their support must be enlisted in matters of goals and details.

The school board ultimately will make decisions on the basis of the "if-then" test outputs. A major benefit of citizen participation is that it eases the burden on the school board, allowing its members to observe the reactions of individuals and groups and to act more as an umpire than as judge and jury.

Geography Dictates

The two dimensions of geographical space make redistricting a non-trivial problem. A supply of X classrooms cannot simply be filled by assigning Y students to them, as if one were filling crates with manufactured parts. Instead, the students must be drawn from their homes. Distance intervenes. This implies selecting areas, which creates travel patterns. In turn, the number of potential solutions increases.

Many things must be done to cope with geography. First, accurately mapped student data are required. Many people think they know where students live, but their ideas are intuitive, and redistricting cannot proceed on that basis. Hard evidence is required--computer-drawn dot maps showing students' precise residence location.

In the Danbury, Conn., study, our preconception had been that minority students would be living in highly concentrated areas. Computer-drawn maps showed this was inaccurate; a secular trend toward dispersion seemed to be at work.

In one sense this was a positive finding because it demonstrated a freer housing market. Curiously, however, it made the redistricting task harder since larger areas of mixed populations had to be reassigned to change minority enrollments in certain schools.

Second, redistricting has a functional relationship with street systems (and their traffic volumes and speeds) and with land uses. Boundaries determine whether children must cross arterials, what kinds of areas they must traverse on the way to school, and which buses they will take. Redistricting can align enrollment areas (and the PTAs they imply) with existing neighborhoods and communities or it can divide those neighborhoods.

This suggests that redistricting is not simply a matter of loading all buildings equally and at a high level, critical as that is. Wide urban planning issues are at stake. We strongly encourage close coordination between the school district and the local planning board and traffic engineering department. Internally, the design of new enrollment areas also needs inputs from the school district's transportation supervisor.

Future Implications

A number of points relate directly to the long-range management of a school district's capital plant.

Each district should monitor, preferably annually, current and near-term (2-7 years) demands for classroom space. This needs to be done not simply in terms of aggregates, but also in terms of individual school loadings and, where appropriate, by race or other social indicator.

The impact of changed student locations is best examined by using a redistricting software package that can spot and count students by location and by race or income level if desired. The school administrator should thoroughly understand that quality mapping and student address data are required for the software program; assembling these data is a key part of the redistricting process.

At least a year before school loading problems become critical, the district ought to begin redistricting studies. If school construction and new building location decisions are to be made, the desirable lead time is two years. If redistricting studies are incorporated within the school construction planning process, the district may be able to optimize construction programs and reduce costs.

Building a consensus regarding change is vital in avoiding hidden mines. Preparing a formal, carefully constructed statement off goals is a logical first step in bringing parents and the school administration into agreement.

Public confidence in the technical process can only be achieved where the process is shown to be objective, impartial, and accurate, where alternatives are examined speedily and accurately, and where the goals that were approved at the outset are demonstrated to have been met.

Roger Creighton retired in 1992 as chairman of Creighton Manning, a transportation consulting firm. He is author of School Redistricting: Policies and Procedures, published in 1994 by Oakmore Associates, Oakland, Calif. Douglas Hamlin is chief operating officer of the firm.

Using Swing Areas to Anticipate Growth

A real dilemma faces school districts in which certain areas are growing rapidly. On the one hand, such districts want to create stable, contiguous enrollment areas, each serving its own home school. On the other hand, new developments may spring up in unexpected locations, overburdening the enrollment area in which they are located.

To provide for the unexpected, a creative solution that I have proposed is to define a few "swing areas" when redistricting. Parents within each swing area are given a choice between two or possibly three schools that their children may attend.

The underlying theory is that parents will make informed choices, perhaps after visiting each school, in the best interest of their children. These choices will be based on a variety of factors including current student enrollment at each of the potential schools. As development occurs and a school starts to become overcrowded, the parents in the swing areas would tend to move their children to the less-crowded school.

To make this work, care must be taken in designing the swing areas. The swing area should lie midway between alternative schools, and the competing schools' facilities and educational programs should be equal This method is easier to implement and manage than other methods of flexibility such as creating buffer zones or overlap areas around all school boundaries.

The net effect of this solution is to provide flexibility of loading that will respond to parental wishes and that is capable of responding to future patterns of housing development.