2 or 3 high schools in Iowa City?

Two high schools or three?

Among all the questions the Iowa City school board must answer as it decides how to redraw school boundaries, the lingering high school issue is the most basic. Should the school district build a third comprehensive high school, or make do with the two it has now?

“They're going to have to make some really difficult decisions in the sense of, what direction do they go with a two-high school or three-high school” scenario, said Rob Schwarz of RSP and Associates, the consultant the district hired to help it redraw school boundaries.

The school board will take up the boundary issue, known as redistricting, at a work session at 6:30 tonight. The board has stayed on the periphery until now, with RSP leading a 38-person committee that came up with three scenarios for the board's consideration.

The school board's decision is expected by the end of the school year.

High school enrollment is what got the redistricting process started last summer. City High is under capacity, and West is full and growing. School officials would like to build a new high school in a few years, but they don't believe the district has the money to run it.

The school board decided that as long as it was looking at the high schools, it only made sense to address all school boundaries. Now, how to move forward is centered around what to do with the high schools, board President Patti Fields said.

“I don't think we can lose sight of that, because that was the catalyst for this entire discussion,” she said.

The boundary scenarios lay out three possibilities for the high schools: two of them call for two high schools and another has three high schools, or perhaps a ninth-grade school that could be converted into a high school.

Other grades are affected as well, with each scenario carrying the potential for numerous changes.

Schwarz said the Iowa City school district is unusual in that most communities he's worked in have had a clear priority. Here, however, some people want a third high school, while some believe it's too expensive. Some people want a better distribution of poor students, some put a priority on neighborhood schools.

“When you have a school district that's made up of several different municipalities, they're all trying to create their own identity, and the school district kind of works beyond those boundaries,” he said.

The Iowa City school district includes Iowa City, Coralville, North Liberty, Hills and University Heights.

Officials admit it will be impossible to please everyone.

The ultimate goal of redistricting, Assistant Superintendent Ann Feldmann said, is “to get our district in a better place, in a better position to serve kids, and the main issues that we're attempting to solve are capacity issues.”

The board gave the committee four criteria to serve as guiding principals in developing boundary plans. Those were, in ranked order: operational costs, enrollment/using buildings efficiently, maintaining neighborhood schools and student demographics.

Those are not always compatible. For example, to better distribute low-income students, some students would need to be sent away from their neighborhood schools. That was met by broad dissatisfaction from the community, so the scenarios don't make major changes to student demographics at the elementary-school level.