Newton’s Superintendent of Schools David Fleishman doesn’t actually use the word “redistricting” in this memo to Newton school families today.
Dear Newton Families,
As many of you are aware, we have begun an exciting time of facilities renovation and expansion in the Newton Public Schools. The recently renovated Carr School, which is currently housing the Angier School during its renovation, is a terrific modern facility. We expect our Long Range Facilities Plan to continue for many years. A key aspect of this plan is not only the rebuilding and renovation of aging buildings but also expanding their capacity to meet the needs of our growing population. A new Angier school will open in January 2016, with Zervas to follow in September 2017. A renovated or rebuilt Cabot is planned for January 2018.
We currently have schools that are over crowded and a few schools that will soon reach expanded capacity. As a result, we will address the student assignment process, a task that will involve moving elementary boundary lines. We expect that the student assignment plans will be addressed in phases, in order to match the timing of the various school construction and/or renovation projects. The initial phase for the first three schools will be addressed this year and additional phases will occur as the plan for rebuilding/renovating elementary schools continues for the next 15-20 years.
I am well aware that shifting elementary boundary lines represents a significant change. Please keep in mind that most residences across the City will remain in their current districts. However, our space challenges necessitate some movement. As a result, we have created a Student Assignment Working Group, which will develop criteria for evaluating various assignment scenarios based on mapping data and other information. A recommendation will be made to the School Committee by the end of the school year.
We fully appreciate that communication and community engagement are essential when making such changes. In addition to providing regular updates at School Committee meetings, there will be public meetings that will focus solely on this topic. Student assignment planning will be on the agenda when School Committee members join me at PTO meetings in each of the schools over the next few months.
Our goal is to develop a process that is thoughtful and sensitive. We will be certain to update you over the course of the year and further information will be provided on our website.
Sincerely,
David Fleishman
Superintendent of Schools
How is it possible for Zervas to open in September 2017 and Cabot in January 2018 with only one swing space?
Why does the Cabot refer to “renovate or replace”– wasn’t the ballot question for $30 million to replace?
Would appreciate it if anyone with knowledge, Steve Siegel or others, could explain.
Well this letter tells the community very little at present. My first question is this. Where will the new boundary changes likely occur? For example I see little redistricting needed on the north side, that is north of the Pike.
It would be helpful for the school authorities to provide an over view of the trouble spots where redistricting could be of greatest impact.
The entire process of rebuilding schools has been ongoing for 20 years. Bowen, Mem. Spaulding, Williams, Newton South and North. So this next phase is nothing new. However, the scope and cost has escalated quickly for the elementary schools. $120 million for 3 new elementary facilities seems excessive.
No wonder we can’t afford to fix the sewers and storm drains without additional tax hikes. The school side budget is hogging all the city revenues. What a disaster for the community to spend so irresponsibly.
@Paul: That’s a typo — Cabot won’t be ready until January of 2019.
Also, here is the text of Question 3 from the March 2013 override ballot:
“Shall the City of Newton be allowed to exempt from the provisions of Proposition two and one- half, so called, the amounts required to pay for the bonds issued in order to renovate or replace the Cabot Elementary School?” (My italics)
Colleen, the Student Assignment Working Group has only just started meeting so there is nothing to report for a while. To your question about “trouble spots” – if these are represented by highest average class size, Horace Mann and Burr top out at 22.8 and 22.3. If we look for schools that have repurposed every available space into classrooms and/or already have all the modulars their sites can carry we’d add Bowen and Mason-Rice to the answer. I’m not sure if this is what you’re asking but there will be little to report until the working group has had more time at it.
Colleen, did you see my April column in the TAB that highlighted the Newton School System’s spending surge?
http://newton.wickedlocal.com/article/20140428/NEWS/140426629
Did you know that Hingham built their new East Elementary School building for $26.9 Million? Hingham spent $26.9 Million to build a 91,000 square foot facility. Meanwhile, Newton will spend $37.5 Million to build a new 75,000 square foot facility.
You are so right Joshua. Newton is a very big spender excessively so. Zervas will be very costly due to a poor site choice for a very enlarged school building. No state reimbursement as well which has never happened before.
Matt Hills isn’t worried however as he believes Newton residents will continue to enable his follies with tax overrides.
To Steve, the North side can easily redistrict for Burr and H.Mann. We have a new facility at the Carr school which should be used for any population surge on the northside. L. Elliot, Burr, Franklin could easily be helped by use of Carr.
Cabot and M.Rice could be relieved from over growth by using Carr for redistricting.
While I respect our leaders, I have to disagree. This is like re-arranging the chairs on a sinking cruise ship. You can shift kids one year from one school to the other but the real issue is that at some point, there won’t be any space left. We are a growing community (and we keep adding more and more apartments and townhomes). We need to add capacity! Replacing our old, decaying buildings is great, but we need MORE buildings.
Our neighborhood all attends one elementary school. All the kids are bussed there because our local elementary school closed before we moved into the neighborhood. In addition to breaking up neighborhoods into different schools, so kids don’t attend school with neighbors, you are also creating a busssing nightmare. Because the buffer zone neighborhood is probably a bussing zone, it sounds like a neighborhood could have a “home” school (School A). When School A is full, then the new kids go to School B, and once that school is full, the kids attend School C. Two different busses for one neighborhood. That sounds ridiculous to me. Then what happens when School A feeds into one middle school and School C feeds into another middle school?
What happens when these kids hit middle school? Is there enough capacity there?
Build another school. More capacity but don’t shift kids from school to school. We know our neighbors because our kids attend the same schools. We go to the same PTO fundraisers.
When the group gets underway, I hope they will consider redistricting Mason-Rice students who are within one mile of Newton North, and thus have North as an option. As it stands, there are quite a lot of kids who live on the North side of Comm. Ave. who are pretty much equi-distant between Mason-Rice and Cabot, and ultimately opt to attend North. I understand that over the past 5 or 6 years, more and more M-R parents in this situation have been seeking to have their kids attend Bigelow in anticipation of attending North. Essentially, many M-R families have been redistricting themselves by choice so this would be a natural option to consider.
@NewtonMom:
The approach being taken by the City is to fix our deteriorated and functionally compromised elementary schools and add capacity as we go. Between Angier, Cabot, and Zervas, 250 seats will be added and the “good fit” capacity of our elementary schools will be 300-400 above that. Our enrollment projections indicate that our elementary school population will cap with room to spare though we watch the numbers every years to make sure we are not caught off guard.
The work of the Student Assignment Working Group includes careful study of middle and high school “feeder patterns“so that we don’t solve our elementary school problems at the expense of our secondary schools. The School Committee and NPS are commencing our annual PTO and school council visits at all city schools and these visits offer opportunities for school parents and other members of the public to offer their feedback regarding the student assignment process and considerations. Look for notices from your school community. We are also looking for organized ways to solicit perspectives from the non-school-parent community and suggestions are welcome.
Finally, buffer zones are invaluable tools when school buildings are at or above capacity. As our new projects create additional capacity it is my expectation that the use of buffer zones will shrink.
Thank you Lisap!
Regards, Steve
@Colleen,
You mentioned school related costs hogging city revenues. But I think you know that water and sewer is a separate budget completely, and is considered a user fee.
Dan, you may remember when D. Cohen was mayor. He implemented a new tax which was levied for underground pipe repair and replacement. I think it was 1% of annual property tax assessment. This levy appears on the Jan. tax statement or perhaps the July tax bill. This was done to supplement the user fee which was not viewed as sufficient to replace the infrastructure.
With all due respect to the fine comments on this thread, I think people are missing an important point about redistricting…
The Superintendent works for you. The School Department works for you. The School Committee works for you. Should they really be telling you where your kids are going to school? I think they’ve all got it backwards! When it comes to which school a child will attend, it’s the job of public officials and city employees to do a lot of listening, and take their marching orders from parents. Their ability to deliver what parents want, should be the standard by which their job performance is judged.
Mike Striar – THANK YOU.
I keep waiting for someone to report that Fleishman is a finalist for a job somewhere other than Newton. This guy has got to go.
Unfortunately no one would want him. No other school district/SC would ever hire a plagiarist.
From plagiarism to euphemism.
Any predictions for when the ‘R’ word begins to be used again?
All three of my sons were redistricted and for two of them, it wasn’t an issue at all. Even the son who was redistricted to a middle school that was 1.99 miles from our home (and 100 yards on the wrong side of the bussing line) from a school that was a mile from our home adjusted very easily.
The only difficult situation was with the son who was redistricted from one MS to another midstream and attended 4 schools in 5 years. I feel confident that the SC understood that this was tough on the kids and has committed to a redistricting policy that keeps students in the school where they entered.
Good One Julia!
Maybe when we get a new Superintendent who is honest and has integrity.
Steve, I was pretty sure it was a typo to. Until I realized that all the other Cabot parents tonight were counting the years on their fingers, trying to figure out when the construction starts. The city or the Super should correct.
I will say again Cabot will end up being delayed due to Zervas. I’m guessing September 2019.
As for Mike, all true statements, but not very helpful in any complex situation. So you propose open enrollment? Parents get to choose, right? MY CHILD MUST ATTEND SCHOOL IN WABAN. OR NEWTONVILLE. I HEAR MASON-RICE IS THE BEST. OR ZERVAS.
C’mon now. Easy to say, impossible to do. Yes, the school committee should listen to parents. but buffer zones are common in most communities. you buy your home in most cases knowing you are in a buffer zone. It can completely suck if it comes out of nowhere. Hopefully they keep the same kids in the same schools if possible. But when schools expand, don’t the zones HAVE to change, just logically?
As for our superintendent, besides for his proofreading skills, I’m willing to give him a second chance. He made a mistake on the speech. Let it go at this point. Doesn’t mean forget, it just means allow someone a second chance.
Thanks Fig. For what it is worth, The Angier project, representing step one in the choreography that is the Carr School swing space, is on time and on budget. Foundation work is wrapping and structural steel delivery commences today! Angier is about to pop from the ground.
Regarding student assignment work, of course it the job of NPS and the SC to solicit input, study the facts on the ground, and recommend a plan. And we have a history of responsiveness — within buffer zones, families that have expressed a preference for one school over the other have been assigned to their choice school 80% of the time.
Fig – I have kids in the NPS and I dont want a Plagiarist as the head of the education dept . The SC can spin it anyway they want – but it is what it is. They were just too spineless to fire him. And he of course didn’t think he did anything wrong – as anyone else in his position would have resigned. The Mansfield superintendent did just that this summer.
Would you be OK with a Fire Chief that was an arsonist – just one time? Or a Police Chief that committed Just one crime? I certainly wouldn’t want them as the head of those or any depts.
@fig– Did I propose “open enrollment”? Huh, must have missed that. But since you read my comment and assessed it as “all true statements,” then what exactly do you disagree with? In my opinion, parents should be alarmed that the most tone deaf School Committee in memory is going to change where their kids go to school.
“He made a mistake on the speech. Let it go at this point. Doesn’t mean forget, it just means allow someone a second chance.”
Agree, but referring to REDISTRICTING as “shifting elementary lines” – really?? His rather odd choice of words are a sly distortion of what’s on the table. Maybe I’m reading too much into it but why beat around the bush with such an important topic.
Hello Robert S. “Shifting the lines” is not an odd choice of words; rather it precisely describes what is being proposed. For example, we don’t expect that the enlarged Zervas will fill by grabbing kids currently attending other Newton schools and plunking them into Zervas. Instead, we expect to permanently move the lines that define Zervas’s catchment area so that the land area of the Zervas district becomes larger. Each year after the line shift we expect to assign only kindergarteners and new “move-in students” from the new Zervas territory into Zervas. The approach hasn’t been fully analyzed yet, but optimally every student in the new Zervas territory currently attending another elementary school will remain at that school for the duration of their elementary school career. If this is the selected model, it will take up to 6 years before every student in the expanded Zervas territory attends Zervas.
Why am I using words like “expect” and “optimally” and not speaking with more certainty? Because part of the analysis of the Working Group will be to calculate whether the strategy described will move enough students to Zervas quickly enough to successfully address too-high enrollments of nearby schools. If the migration just described is too slow, perhaps tools including giving, say, current Mason Rice students who live in the new Zervas territory the choice of moving to the new school, will be proposed.
There are many considerations, and before solidifying guidelines and strategies within the Working Group we will be soliciting suggestions and feedback from the public.
Regards, Steve
Since when is Plagiarism a mistake?
@Joanne: When isn’t it?
The term redistricting has always referred to moving an entire elementary school population from one middle school to another. Mason-Rice and Cabot are typically the schools that have been redistricted on several occasions in the past
(M-R on multiple occasions, Cabot on three occasions that I can recall). Redistricting relieves overcrowding at the middle and high school level, but doesn’t address the issue at the elementary level, and that’s become a necessity at this point. In order to achieve this goal, the city needs to increase elementary school capacity, use buffer zones and/or shift elementary lines.
Two of my sons were never in a class with fewer than 25 students in very small classroom spaces (760 sf) at Cabot, while the same cohorts at Underwood had 18 student/class with significantly larger classrooms space. This is an example of a situation where shifting elementary lines could have provided a comparable educational elementary experience to more students, and at the same time avoided a significant increase/decrease in the student population at individual middle and high schools, thus keeping the numbers at those schools stable over time.
The “R” word has officially been introduced by Jenna Fisher from the Newton TAB.
With all due respect to Jenna Fisher (and I do respect her work), she doesn’t know what the term means.
Jane, you don’t know what it means.
A quick google search of “redistricting schools” brought this up as first link:
“The new Bancroft School will be open for the 2014-15 school year. In order to prepare for its expanded capacity, and to re-balance the student population at all of our elementary schools, the Andover Public Schools will initiate a redistricting process this fall which will result in the drawing of new elementary school district lines. ”
Are they wrong too?
Sheesh.
Paul-I’m an Andover native and read exactly the quote you cite here because I still read the local paper online. They are not wrong, nor are we. Andover has never “redistricted” as we have on many occasions in the past. My concern with using the word “redistricting” in Newton is that anyone who knows its history here will associate it with the angst-ridden process of the past.
In Newton redistricting has a certain context that needs to be acknowledged and distinguished from what is presently being proposed. It has always referred to the process of moving entire elementary school populations from one middle school to another after fifth grade. This process basically affected only four elementary schools – Cabot, Mason-Rice, Lincoln-Eliot, and Williams. In the case of Mason-Rice and Williams, it meant the entire school populations were assigned to a different middle school and high school. In addition, M-R was redistricted multiple times to different middle and high schools. In the case of Williams, students were redistricted from a walkable MS and HS to one that was a 20 minute drive away. Cohorts of Cabot students were assigned to a different middle school – from a walkable MS to and one that was close to 2 miles away and not walkable in the morning – then redistricted back again several years later. Many Lincoln-Eliot students have had to cross over the Circle of Death to get to Bigelow – no need to say more about why parents wouldn’t want that scenario.
Needless to say redistricting, doing it the Newton way, caused constant angst for parents and students in these four schools because of the implications for middle and high school placement, its timing, and the effect it had on MS size. About 10 years ago, the system began shifting elementary school lines by establishing set boundaries in what were previously “optional” areas between two particular schools in order to relieve overcrowding at one of the two schools. This meant that families knew their child’s trajectory through the K-12 system from the get-go, rather than finding out when their child was in fifth grade that they would be assigned to a different middle and perhaps high school than they had expected.
Most importantly, this definition did not relieve elementary school overcrowding. In last few years, the system has put in place several measures to relieve overcrowding. These measures include the entire city in the solution to a serious problem that adversely affects the quality of elementary education in many schools. In order to maintain a high quality education at the elementary level, we need to relieve the overcrowding problem and shifting elementary school boundaries is just one part of a multi-pronged solution.
Whatever Jane.
Redistricting is an appropriate term to be used. Its been used in reference to Newton’s “shift of elementary school lines” in the past — feel free to spend some time on Google– and its used in other school districts all around the country.
Just because Newton has messed up redistricting in the past, doesn’t mean that term is verboten. Your comments saying that Jenna Fisher doesn’t know what the term means is just wrong. Period.
Whatever. This hardly an issue to get into a snit about.
Happy holidays and New Year.