EDITORIAL: Residents already supported intermediate school plan, so there’s no need to change now.
Several hundred residents interrupted their holiday plans to attend a special public information session at Triangle School last week to discuss the district’s new plan for school boundaries.
Somehow, we suspect if the school district’s redistricting committee had stuck to the plan everyone was expecting moving all fifth and sixth graders to the Autumn Road School the crowd would have been much smaller.
While it is worth noting that the committee’s motivation in designing the new plan minimizing the impact of redistricting to less than 150 students is commendable, the plan is still an about-face from what everyone in Hillsborough was counting on.
That was what most of the speakers at the meeting objected to for the last year and a half, we’ve been working towards the conversion of Autumn Road School to an intermediate school, and parents of young students have been preparing for the day when the schools would change.
The new plan delays that day until the sixth grade for the students, when they will attend Autumn Road School for one year, then move to Hillsborough Middle School for seventh grade.
But past the "inconvenience" of not moving fifth graders next year, the proposal has one peculiar feature which makes it impossible to implement the redistricting would put students in the Williamsburg, Weybridge and Aspen Court neighborhoods on long bus trips to Woodfern School.
While the students would almost certainly enjoy the country vistas available at Woodfern, we can’t think of any reason to isolate these students in this way.
We understand there are many factors which must be taken into consideration when trying to allocate the students consideration must be given to any special needs of the students, the teaching staff and other factors besides simply finding an open seat.
But the anomalies created by shifting 49 students from their neighborhood to the farthest possible location is nothing short of bizarre. The students all live within one mile of three elementary schools, and they will be surrounded by students attending Triangle School.
If the 49 students are sent to Woodfern, they will be dispersed through five grade levels, meaning they’ll have limited interaction with others from their neighborhood. What kinds of social activities and lessons will they miss out on because they don’t get to know the kids around the corner or across the street?
Unless these students can be integrated into neighborhood classrooms in the same manner every other student in Hillsborough enjoys, this plan is unacceptable.
It’s time to return to the plan approved and accepted by Hillsborough voters and students, and make Autumn Road School an intermediate school.