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Redrawing school boundaries can be a nightmare of balancing competing interests and goals. If you find reasonable boundaries that put the appropriate number of students in a school, you may find that the student population is segregated by race. Once you address that issue, you may find that one school is full of students from wealthy families and another has a sky-high free and reduced lunch rate. Redraw everything to even out the economic distribution, and you might find that too many of your students are spending hours each week on the bus to and from school. Add in families worried about the impact new boundaries might have on their children’s education, and the whole project can feel a little hopeless and completely thankless.

At Muskogee Public Schools, however, we found that with appropriate communication, plenty of data, and the right tools to make that data accessible and easy to understand, redrawing boundaries doesn’t have to be a chore for administrators or an emotional roller coaster for parents. On the contrary, it might even help to uncover some new opportunities for your district.

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