Schools must adapt.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Over the next decade the Eugene School District can expect to shrink by about 1,000 students. The percentage of those students who are members of ethnic or racial minorities will grow by 50 percent, while the percentage qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches will increase by a third and the percentage enrolled in special education programs will rise by nearly a quarter. The changes won't be evenly distributed, either geographically or by grade level.

Preparing for these changes will be neither simple nor cheap. A failure to prepare, however, would bring wasteful spending, deepened inequities and a loss of opportunities to improve students' educations.

The demographic projections are part of the impetus for the Eugene School Board's strategic planning effort, called Shaping 4J's Future. It's an important undertaking - before the board can decide whether to close any schools or build new ones, for instance, it needs to know where the students will be and what types of schools will suit them best. The exercise will affect schools' size, number, faculty mix, location and attendance boundaries. It will influence the socio-economic and racial composition of each school's student body.

The work has proceeded quietly until now. It began a year ago with eight focus groups made up of teachers and other school employees, each of which examined an area of concern such as school size and special education. A group dubbed the Think Tank, 12 people with long histories of professional or civic involvement in education, reviewed the focus groups' reports and came up with its own set of recommendations that will be presented to the school board today. The public will have a chance to get involved this fall, as the board reviews the Think Tank's advice.

The Think Tank offered some far-reaching ideas - including a recommendation that no elementary school have an enrollment of fewer than 350 students. A third of the district's schools do not meet that standard, and six of them are in buildings too small to accommodate that many students. Yet common sense supports the notion that a critical mass of students allows a school to efficiently support adequate programs in such areas as art, music and special education. The district may be unable to achieve larger enrollments in all of its schools anytime soon, but as future closures and consolidations are planned, a shift toward fewer but bigger schools can occur.

The Think Tank also recommended against closing any of the Eugene district's four high schools, and equalizing their enrollments. This won't be easy, because enrollment is projected to fall most steeply in the high school grades. Most of the decline will be concentrated in the North Eugene High School area, and North already has the lowest enrollment of the four schools. The implication is that students' ability to choose their high school will be restricted somehow, and that attendance boundaries will be redrawn.

The Think Tank rejected major changes in schools' grade configurations. The district's recent creation of a kindergarten through eighth grade school combining Jefferson Middle School and the Magnet Arts Alternative Elementary School would be a one-off program, rather than the first of many of its kind. Maintaining the current configurations would allow the district to make use of more of its existing buildings. At the same time, the Think Tank advised that the district prepare to offer full-day kindergarten. Some schools could not currently accommodate all-day kindergarten classes, but the addition may be required by the state or could come about through the district's own initiative.

Each Think Tank recommendation has its strengths and weaknesses. The planning effort as a whole, however, is essential. The Eugene School District is changing in profound ways. The district will have to adapt - and mapping a strategy will make the adaptation less expensive and more successful.