MARYSVILLE Drop a stone in a pond and the ripples travel outwards.
The Marysville School District is about to drop a 500-student elementary school in the center of its 73-square-mile service area, and now must decide who gets to attend the new Grove Elementary School and who gets shifted around the points of the compass.
The 10-acre campus at Grove Street and 67th Avenue in the center of Marysville will open by the fall of 2008 and a huge committee of parents and administrators is setting attendance boundaries for the districts 10 current elementary schools. Those boundaries will shift as Grove Elementary School opens, absorbing 450 to 550 new youngsters, most from nearby Pinewood and Allen Creek elementary schools. The good news is that more space will be freed up in those cramped facilities; the bad news is that some of the districts youngest students will have to be uprooted, and the effects will spread outward as the 57-member task force decides who stays and who moves.
While elementary school students wont shift until 2008, the district is moving to an all-middle school configuration this fall, when a standard sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade configuration is implemented. Because elementary schools feed those middle schools, the boundary committee will have to set attendance areas for both elementary and middle schools this spring. Middle school attendance areas will shift in 2007, with elementary schools the next year.
Its an arduous task, said John Fotheringham. A former Tukwila School District Superintendent, Fotheringham spoke to the Marysville School District at their Jan. 3 meeting.
The committee has two parents from each school as voting members, for 31, with five at-large members from the community, two board members, five union representatives, and six staffers from the district planning team, including Fotheringham. Since attendance areas determine busing routes and building capacity, the committee is using sophisticated software from the district transportation department to see how moving boundaries affects students and district logistics.
Board member Cindy Erickson made it clear they were dealing with more than just numbers.
We will be making some parents upset, Erickson told her peers, adding in effect, so be it; they will do the best they can.
According to Fotheringham, the Grove boundaries have tentatively been set, and the new school will draw most of it students from Pinewood ( 38.2 percent) and Allen Creek (31 percent), with the balance from other schools. Because there will be an estimated 2,177 new homes in the district built in the next few years, the committee limited Groves initial batch of students to 450, although the new buildings capacity will be 500 to 550 seats. That will provide some growing room over the next few years but not much, Fotheringham said, since 1,148 of those new homes are slated for the Grove attendance area already. Additional growth will bring 250 new kids just to the Grove attendance area by 2008, so the new $19.8 million school will likely only add a net increase of 250 spaces.
Our initial projection is pretty conservative, it may be a wash, Fotheringham explained. If you look east, Grove is essentially incorporating a whole bunch of big construction projects in there now, so weve got to leave some slack in there for new kids.
Relieving the pressure on Allen Creek is crucial; like a lot of elementary schools, the campus on 64th Street has portables which will not be going away anytime soon. Allen Creek is at the extreme edge of its attendance area and Superintendent Larry Nyland has cautioned several times over the last year that was in danger of being gerrymandered out its own boundaries.
Another important fix in Fotheringhams view is taking care of the Marshall Islanders. Thats a bitter pun for folks who bought houses next to Sunnyside Elementary School, the districts most southerly school, who then saw their youngsters bused the six miles north to Marshall Elementary School on 116th Street NE. But there are three elementary schools between the Grove and Marshall campuses, including Pinewood, Cascade and Kellogg Marsh.
When Grove takes a chunk of Allen Creek, the Allen Creek borders move south, Fotheringham continued, noting that makes more room at Sunnyside in turn, which should then be able to house the Marshall Islanders closer to home. So at least those people should be happy; the pressure on Sunnyside is being relived. Thats why you have that domino effect and some of it can be pretty positive.
For people who bought homes in sight of Sunnyside that will be positive, but Fotheringham noted that changing some children from riding a yellow bus to walking can upset parents. Setting attendance boundaries involves a bunch of factors, including keeping siblings in the same schools and maintaining the integrity of English Language Learner and special needs programs.
The boundary committee has met four times and should be finished with new elementary and middle school attendance boundaries by April. The committee will meet again on Jan. 11 at 6 p.m. in the Strawberry Room at district headquarters; written comments can be sent to the same address at 4220 80th Street NE, Marysville, WA 98270. For more information the district phone number is 360-653-7058.