By Dan E. Way
dway@heraldsun.com; 419-6654
HILLSBOROUGH -- With steadily increasing student enrollment straining the capacities of some of its school buildings, the Orange County Schools Board of Education has approved a school redistricting plan.
School board candidates in this year's election have varying opinions about how to go about the process.
But all eight agreed on two things at a Wednesday candidates forum -- the effort will be emotionally charged, and they wanted to avoid at all costs a Wake County-style imbroglio in which a longstanding policy of creating student diversity through school busing rapidly shifted under a newly elected school board to a new policy of maintaining neighborhood schools without forced busing, which has generated turmoil in that county.
"We have already decided yes, we are going to redistrict," school board chairwoman Anne Medenblik said at the candidates forum, held at the old county courthouse and sponsored by the Northern Orange Black Voters Alliance. She said the board's unanimous approval on Monday spoke to the need to redraw school boundary lines.
"Redistricting is a necessary evil," but doesn't have to degenerate into split communities, said incumbent Debbie Piscitelli, whose seat is one of four open in this year's nonpartisan school board race.
"My intention has always been being objective," but others have failed in that aim, Piscitelli acknowledged, citing past experience as a parent member on the last redistricting committee in 2005-2006. Personal agendas and power struggles tainted that process, she said.
Because the district is small and its schools centrally located, the district can achieve diversity in student populations without extending what already are an hour and 40 minute one-way bus rides for some students, Piscitelli said. That would be accomplished by using an objective approach with a common-sense layer.
"We're all emotionally invested" in schools, said Laura Nicholson. "We're going to have to redistrict whether we want to or not."
That's because of what she called "a unique situation in Orange County right now and it has to be addressed." Two elementary schools are over capacity and one is only at half capacity she said, without naming any schools. New Hope and Cameron Park elementary schools would fit the description of the former, and Central Elementary the latter.
"It just doesn't make sense," Nicholson said, calling for the redistricting to be done "in a way that is fair" and not showing favoritism to a particular school or neighborhood, while giving weight to parent and student needs.
"One of the key items to me is ensuring diversity," said Will Atherton. Though the school board plans to use an N.C. State University agency to draw school boundary lines in a scientific manner, Atherton said getting feedback from the community is essential.
"We've got to listen to the public we serve," Atherton said, conceding "a lot of mistakes" were made during the last redistricting and people "are very emotional about that."
"Redistricting is the bane of every school board member's existence," said Brenda Stephens. "It is inevitable when a county is growing as Orange County is growing."
However, she said, "I do have a level of discomfort if we're going to spend a large amount of money" on an outside firm to do the work.
"Before we move forward to redistricting, which I think we have to do, I think it's very important for us to consider strongly the [criteria for] transfers that are going to be approved," Stephens said. Under current policy, she explained, some schools get lots of incoming transfers while others, which are "not quite as desirable to some [parents]," seldom get incoming transfers and, thus, seats are under-utilized there, Stephens said.
In addition to the elementary school population imbalances, "the two high schools are way out of alignment with each other as far as the free and reduced lunch rates," which often are used as an indicator of at-risk students, said Donna Coffey, "so when you're talking about diversity you have to talk about the whole thing."
The school district will need to engage and communicate clearly with stakeholders, parents, staff and the community "not only from the beginning but throughout the whole process," Coffey said, and "districtwide core values and beliefs need to be agreed to up front, and you can't change the rules in the middle of the process."
"I'm going to make sure I listen to what parents have to say to me," said Greg Williams. "I was one of the people on that bus for an hour and 45 minutes in a little community out towards the Chatham County line," so he's interested in looking for ways that shorten, not lengthen, the bus rides for those students.
Citing the population growth in the school district, Williams said "we have to look at the data, remember the parents in the equation -- "It's their children we're talking about" -- and "ultimately just make good decisions."
"Once you make the hard choice to do it you have to stand by it," said Keith Cook, and that has not happened since the last redistricting.
"We allowed parents of one school to say they weren't going to allow their students to go to another," Cook said in an apparent reference to Central Elementary School, saying it is now one of the better schools in the district.
Transferring a student out of a school "needs to be about the child," he said, not a parent's inconvenience, and once policy is set, the goal should be "not to deviate from it unless it's an emergency" requiring a transfer.
