Lawrence School District committee on high school boundaries to seek consultant’s analysis – The Lawrence Times

Lawrence School District committee members working on high school boundaries decided Wednesday they needed more input from a consultant before presenting their ideas to the community.

The Boundary Advisory Committee is tasked with making a recommendation that will hopefully balance enrollment more evenly between Lawrence and Free State high schools.

Lawrence High’s enrollment has fallen behind Free State’s by hundreds of students in recent years. A count in September showed LHS had 1,484 students and Free State had 1,797. Although the count is not exact and keeps changing, it shows a difference of 313 students between the schools.

RSP & Associates, the consultant previously hired to support the committee’s efforts, was not present at Wednesday’s meeting after the school board decided the consultants would have a smaller role in the discussions. Assistant Superintendent Larry Englebrick facilitated the meeting.

Englebrick said the two high schools are designed to accommodate roughly 1,800 students, which is about 85 percent building utilization, but a five-year projection shows Free State is approaching capacity and LHS moves further away. Lawrence School Board President Kelly Jones said in June that the district needed to work to increase Lawrence High’s enrollment to reevaluate equity considerations and prevent the school from falling to the 5A classification.

During a previous meeting on Sept. 25, the BAC discussed three maps: an L-shaped map, a feeder school map and a grade level map. (See the maps at this link.)

The L-shaped map is called Option 1. It would take the existing boundary and add a new line around Massachusetts Street so that students living on the easternmost side of Lawrence would attend LHS. BAC members said during their previous meeting that the option is the least disruptive of the three, but may not be beneficial in the long term.

Anne Costello, representing school board members on the BAC, said Wednesday that proposed boundary changes in Option 1 to reverse the trend and ultimately put more students at LHS than FSHS may appear to the public to be pointless.

Costello said that while he has previously expressed frustrations with RSP’s facilitation of meetings, he believes the committee’s consideration of options will benefit from more detail the company can provide.

Englebrick said district staff does not have the bandwidth to conduct the analyses. RSP would certainly be the one to step in, but only to provide data analysis and projects, not to facilitate meetings, he said.

By a show of hands, the majority of the committee agreed to request additional information from RSP. Englebrick said he will work to create a recommendation for a contract with RSP that the school board can consider at one of its upcoming meetings.

Option 2, the feeder map, would send students from Billy Mills Middle School and Southwest High School to Lawrence High. Students from Liberty Memorial Central and West would attend Free State, creating a zigzag boundary. Option 3, the grade level map, would have ninth and 10th graders attending Free State and 11th and 12th graders attending Lawrence High.

Englebrick emphasized that options are likely to evolve during this process, especially after public input sessions.

“I’ve told everyone, and maybe not enough and loud enough, I anticipate changes,” Englebrick said. “Every year we’ve seen changes, especially after community input. The community gives good input.”

Emerson Hoffzales, a representative of the BAC teachers’ union, expressed the concern that his colleagues are hearing. They said teachers feel in the dark about the impact the boundary changes would have on them, specifically how staffing would change and how that could affect how many teachers are assigned to buildings. Englebrick said there’s no way to know yet.

“I know it caused concern among the staff in both buildings, as to what it would look like,” Hoffzales said. “I want to put this as a concern for teachers: This is an issue that is being talked about and something that needs to be very much in mind when going through these discussions.”

Next on the committee’s schedule are two public input sessions, where community members are invited to offer comments and ask questions. These are set from 6 to 7:30 pm on Wednesday and Thursday, November 13 and 14 at Free State and Lawrence High, respectively.

Committee members agreed they may require more time to work through potential new data, so postponing public input meetings could be on the table later. For now, Englebrick said, the dates remain the same. He said the district will provide updates if things change.

“I’m willing to say to the community, you know, ‘We want to give you something that’s our best work, rather than something that we think still needs to be improved,'” Englebrick said.

The BAC did not discuss transportation as part of Wednesday’s meeting.

Final boundary recommendations are expected to be presented to the school board in early December.

A list of BAC members and a tentative schedule for the committee’s work are available on the district’s website, usd497.org/Page/17043.

Maya Hodison (her), equity reporter, can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of his work for the Times here. Check out their staff bio here.

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