Iowa City school board starts again on new boundaries

IOWA CITY - The Iowa City school board Tuesday night took another stab at creating new boundaries for elementary schools.

The board received options from Superintendent Stephen Murley for attendance zones for 14 schools that could take effect starting in fall 2015.

It included the possible creation of two magnet schools offering special programming. Some proposals also would move students away from their neighborhood schools.

No decisions were made by the board. Tuesday's meeting was the start of its process, and board members have said they hope to vote on boundaries in September.

This is the district's second attempt this year at drawing new boundaries.

Administrators spent several weeks this spring holding public meetings and developing boundary proposals. What they took to the school board would have moved 1,400 students in fall 2015, but it would have had some children switching from schools near their homes to ones farther away.

The school board in May told administrators to try again.

New boundaries are needed for two main reasons. First, the growing district is opening three new elementary schools and a high school in the next several years.

Also, the school board's controversial diversity policy requires a better socio-economic balance between schools as measured by the percentage of their students who receive free or reduced-price lunch, which is a measure of poverty.

But Murley said it was difficult to develop school boundaries that comply with that policy. In response, the school board told him he could de-emphasize the policy, although Murley said Tuesday they tried to follow it as much as possible.

They presented a few options Tuesday night for two clusters of elementary schools.

For southeast Iowa City, one calls for turning Twain Elementary into a magnet school while the other does not.

Both include using 'islands,” which is assigning a section of a neighborhood to a school whose boundary it otherwise would not be in. In other words, students are sent away from their neighborhood school.

School board members said last year that would not happen and wrote it into the diversity policy.

Murley did not give a recommendation of one over the other, saying both have merits. The five school board members present seemed to like the idea of magnet schools, however.

The other cluster, for schools in the northwest of the district, also has an option with islands.

There's also a proposal to use Lincoln Elementary as a magnet school starting in 2019, when a new elementary school opens in North Liberty.

Board members questioned using Lincoln, which has few low-income students, as a magnet school because of its distance from Kirkwood Elementary, which has a large number of those students who board members thought would have transportation problems getting to Lincoln. They asked for a scenario using Kirkwood as a magnet school.

Another proposal would pair Lincoln and Coralville Central so that students in those attendance areas go to Lincoln in kindergarten and first grade and Central in grades three through sixth.

It also would pair Kirkwood and Wickham elementary schools, with Kirkwood hosting kindergarten and first grade and Wickham the latter grades.