School Board talks about redistricting

Due to the increasing enrollments at Sparta Elementary and the dwindling enrollments at Piney Creek and to a lesser extent Glade Creek, the Alleghany County Board of Education is discussing the possibility of beginning to enforce existing district lines. The board also discussed making minor changes to the district lines as they are now drawn. The most recent discussion took place Nov. 29 in a conference room at the Blue Ridge Business Development Center.

Currently, the Alleghany Schools have an "open enrollment" plan that allows parents to enroll their children in any elementary school if they provide transportation. The policy has led to a gradual shift of more than 100 students from Piney Creek and Glade Creek schools into Sparta School. The enrollment at Sparta has grown to more than 760 students, while Piney has fewer than 160 students and Glade has about 255 students.

The board discussed the notion that, ideally, the school system could fully utilize all of its facilities without over-burdening any one school. The board talked about the possibly of having the changes come into effect the beginning of the 2007-08 school year.

The members of the board exchanged several considerations of how the school system could make an easy transition for both parents and students. An example of this would be students who have attended a particular school for two or more years might be given a waiver to continue to attend that school.

Passing a small handout regarding district lines, and using a larger model, Superintendent Jeff Cox showed the board where the district lines currently run.

"We were able to take all the K-8 students and plot them on this map. All the students who are at or are going to Piney Creek School are represented by the blue squares," he said. "Students who are at Sparta School are the yellow triangles and the red diamonds are Glade Creek students.

"Looking at this, out in the Piney Creek district, there are a number of yellow triangles," Cox said. "These are students who are living in Piney Creek district but in fact are going to Sparta School. You'll see the same thing out here in Glade Creek area...we talked about already. There are 60 students in the Glade Creek area going to Sparta School and 40 or so students from Piney who are going to Sparta School.

"(There are) a couple of things I want to draw to your attention as you're looking at this," Cox told board members. "One of the things is the number of students we have who are out of their attendance area. Adopting a policy to enforce district lines as they are would move a lot of students. If we said this is just what we're going to do, starting next year or at some point, you're going to go to the school where you live, a lot of kids would be impacted. The one thing visually I want you to see on this map is if the board wants to entertain any ideas of changing district lines, one thing you want to look at is if we move the lines a little bit any where, how many students are we going to impact? How much good are we going to do ourselves by moving the district lines? As we're talking about doing this, (we need) to understand what kind of impact we're going to have, how much good we're able to do making the adjustments and whether or not it's going to be worth it."

Speaking of his general thoughts on the matter, Cox said, "Step one would be enforcement of district lines as they are. If you just did that, you would impact a pretty considerable number of students. Beyond that, though, if you want to do any kind of change, there are several things I think we need to take into account. But that really includes whether you just enforce existing district lines or make minor changes to the district lines. First, we need the consideration that sometimes we have EC (Exceptional Children) students or ESL (English as a Second Language) students and some other students that may need to be in one school or another. If the school district has a need to send students across district lines for particular programs, we could reserve the right to do that; we are doing that now."

A second issue noted was allowing teachers who work at one school but live in another school district to bring their child to the school at which they teach.

"Do we continue to do that?" Cox asked the board members. "There are a lot of reasons to do that in terms of attracting teachers and keeping our staff happy. Some teachers, if they didn't have that luxury, might choose not to teach with us anymore. That's just the cold, hard reality." Cox also pointed to an example where it may be easier for a parent to send a child to another school. "The flip side is a person who works in town and lives in Piney Creek and it's easier for that parent to bring her child to Sparta School and we say we're not going to allow that anymore," said Cox as an illustration.

Get the rest of this article in this week's issue of the Alleghany News! Back