Apr. 23—GRAND FORKS — Administrators and residents who worked in two groups tasked with redrawing Grand Forks’ school boundary lines will have the opportunity Thursday to set the record straight on their work.
Grand Forks School Board members are set to meet Thursday with members of the demographic task force, a group of mostly school and district officials charged last year with redrawing school boundaries to address Grand Forks’ growth and changing demographics.
The task force produced the first of what has become several proposals on how to redraw boundaries, a process that has now gone months past district leadership’s initial timeline to approve new maps.
The School Board has not yet committed to a date when it will approve new school boundaries, though top administrators have repeatedly spoken in recent weeks about what they’ve said is an increasingly unworkable overcrowding in some southern elementary schools.
Most members of the task force and the larger administrator group who spoke to the Grand Forks Herald said they are looking forward to moving the boundary lines process forward with Thursday’s meeting.
“It’s about problem-solving,” said Central High School Principal Jon Strandell. “We just need to get together and solve the problem, not just get together in isolation.”
Two groups principally composed of school and district administrators met between October and January to hash out the future of Grand Forks’ school boundaries. Fifteen district administrators, principals and two civilian members on the demographic task force spent their time digging into data provided by district demographer Rob Schwarz’s firm RSP & Associates and drawing out hypothetical school borders on maps.
Most of the demographic task force was also part of the larger boundary administration group, which met separately to talk about big-picture issues the new maps needed to address, like school building capacities and new bus routes.
Superintendent Terry Brenner, who participated in the larger administrator group, said he would withhold comment on the boundary lines process until after Thursday’s discussion.
School Board members decided in a September special meeting that the boundary lines groups should prioritize using the district’s existing building space, meaning members had to find creative ways to stretch the boundaries of Grand Forks’ mostly northern and centrally-located schools to the south.
Clark Piepkorn, one of two task force members who is not a district employee, said the task force also prioritized keeping elementary students from having to cross major thoroughfares and making sure that only one middle school would be split between the two high schools.
Boundary lines group members also sought to draw a map that addressed an economic divide between Central and Red River high schools, the latter of which has absorbed much of the city’s new development — and its wealth — in recent decades.
One member of the boundary administration team, who requested anonymity after the district employees received an email telling them to refer all queries about the boundary lines process to the district office, told the Herald that members came to a “pretty good consensus” with the work that went into the first map.
That work remained largely unknown to the public, though, which some members say they believe contributed to the negative response to the maps presented in January.
“I don’t know that there’s a clear understanding of all the factors the demographic task force put into play,” Strandell said.
Most of the more than 900 respondents to an RSP survey conducted after
two January
public forums
responded negatively to the task force’s new maps.
Residents disliked the potential disruption to their neighborhoods, expressed concern the map adjustments would be temporary fixes, and complained the district had not sufficiently sought public input.
“The process was maybe a little bit broken,” said one principal who served on the task force and also requested anonymity. “The urgency, the purpose, was not clearly defined to the public.”
School Board members have since criticized much of the boundary lines process, while some members have called for the process to be revamped to potentially incorporate input from more community stakeholders, including more residents.
Piepkorn is among the task force members who supports greater resident input, saying he would like to have seen the task force solicit community members from all regions of the city.
“I would like to have someone from each area that’s fairly well-connected, so they can go talk to their neighbors,” Piekporn said. “I just think it’s easier if you’re living in those areas and hearing their neighbor’s concerns.”
Some boundary line participants feel frustrated with the School Board’s abortive response to the demographic task force’s work.
“I had a bit of a problem with that reception,” the administrator on the boundary admin team said.
The move by some board members to consider new construction after task force members were told not to do so particularly rankled some administrators.
“What the hell? You gave us these principles and said to not do that and now you’re looking over our work and saying this is no good?” said the principal on the task force.
Several participants also remain concerned about addressing the economic and real estate divides between Central and Red River high schools.
Two maps
created by RSP since January without demographic task force input have repeatedly reworked Central’s borders east of Washington, pushing Central’s southeastern border past the 47th Avenue South limit included in the task force’s first map and then pulling it back to 32nd Avenue.
Piepkorn noted the last set of maps provided to the School Board in March undid the task force’s effort to push Central’s boundaries out to include new southern development.
“They have no new growth,” he said. “The area they’re looking at adding in, I live in that area. Those houses are 55 years old. There’s some nice homes, but it’s an established neighborhood.”
One administrator pointed to Associate Superintendent Catherine Gillach’s observation at a Feb. 24 School Board meeting that board members and public participants were likely wealthier and more likely to reside on the southern end of town.
Families in southern schools were disproportionately represented in RSP’s survey results, with some 71% of respondents saying their home was located in Red River’s current boundaries.
“We need to make sure that … if we have more public voices and public input, we have all voices,” Gillach said at the time. “We have components of our community that are working so hard just to put food on the table, they don’t even know that they should be advocating.”