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Redrawing school boundaries can be a thicket of competing interests and charged emotions. Bringing geographic data into the mix can increase confidence and help manage reactions.
When it comes time to redraw a district’s school boundaries, you get the full gamut of responses. Some stakeholders don't want to see their school boundaries redrawn—they like the schools their children are attending and don't want to change. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who have their own ideas about how the new boundaries should look and make their suggestions known. These conversations affect stakeholders in different ways. Emotions can and will run high, and that’s understandable. These changes will be affecting people’s children after all.
I've learned over the course of my career, especially from mistakes, that redrawing school boundaries has to be a process that involves a lot of communication, a lot of input from stakeholders, and data. Collecting input from families, the community, school board, and more is daunting, but bringing their input into the conversation and working to make it a part of the solution is incredibly valuable. It leads to compromise to get to the best possible place for the school district as a whole. In the end, we know that not everybody is going to be happy, but the process has to be open, transparent, and inclusive if we're going to have any kind of chance at making it work and surviving afterwards.
Any open, transparent, and inclusive process, however, has to begin with accurate data presented in a way that makes sense to the stakeholders. At Community Consolidated School District 15, in Palatine, Ill., we’ve recently had the opportunity and challenge of redrawing our school boundaries. Of all things, data has been a crucial component of making the process go smoothly. Here’s how we implemented a process that is allowing us to consider these changes with confidence, success, and buy in.