PlacentiaSoccerMom wrote:This morning, I had a meeting with Emma's principal. (We are working on a committee together that is recommending boundary changes to the School Board. A powerpoint presentation was being finalized before public meetings and we were making some recommendations about the wording.)
Good for you to get involved in that.
About 2 years ago my wife and I found out the school board was considering rezoning our neighborhood as part of an overall realignment of the school district when two new high schools opened (this fall). We had no clue that was happening. As we found out, the principles at each school got to appoint the neighborhood rep for each neighborhood. Well, our rep was a not doing his job. He preferred us to be rezoned so he didn't get the word out. Oops.
My wife and I are pretty well connected to the neighborhood being on the board of the swim team and she being the big PTO mom she is. We organized a group of volunteers, printed 2,500 flyers letting everyone know what may happend and encouraging everyone to send an email to the school board letting them know what they thought. We didn't specify on the flyer what they should say or suggest what their choice should be, just that we had been rezoned twice in the previous 5 years already.
The volunteers put the flyer on every home in the neighborhood. It is a big neighborhood. My wife went to the next school board meeting and spoke to the board (they have 10-12 citizen slots each meeting where you sign up to talk to the board for 180 seconds). Afterwards two board members approached her and thanked her for coming and speaking. They said they appreciated our position but the board already had the recommendations from the outside consultant on what the boundary options were. None of them satisfied us. The board members said that if we could make our own viable recomendation they would consider it.
So that next day my wife went to the district office and got all the data she could; school capacities, neighborhood population projections, etc. I then went about modeling various scenarious addressing the concerns the board said they had (over crowding, allow growth in certain corridors, minimizing neighborhood rezoning impact, ect.)
I sent my scenario to the board the next week. At the next monthly meeting, the consultant presented his proposals. The two board members then asked "What if you kept neighborhood A where it is at and instead moved B, then instead of moving neighborhood C to school 2, move them to school 3? the consultant redid his maps on the software ( I wish I had it) and he said sheepishly 'yes, that does work'.
Two months later, the actual alignments were voted in, and except for one large neighborhood to the north of us, the new alignments were my plan, exactly.
Up front we were told by friends, neighbors, and some school officials that the alignments wouldn't be changed from what the consultant put out. That the board always went with the consultants recomendations. Well, it just goes to show, you can fight city hall, and sometimes win. This is the 3rd largest school district in Texas, now with over 100,000 students.
BiT, the community organizer.
