By Linda Conner Lambeck

WESTPORT — The Board of Education has set guiding criteria for elementary school redistricting in the 2025-26 academic year, but the urgency expressed when planning started a year ago seems to have dissipated.

“This is not a crisis. This is not a catastrophe,” Supt. of Schools Thomas Scarice told the board Thursday. “You can see by the capacity study we have some space,” he said.

Instead, the school district is trying to adapt plans for the projected opening of a new school — Long Lots — that is sure to attract a bump in enrollment that is hard to predict, the superintendent said.

Scarice calls redistricting a prudent decision, but suggested it will affect fewer students than originally anticipated.

Even so, the parents of those students who still may be affected are mounting a defense.

Worst-case scenario, allow an opt-in or opt-out, urged Rory Clark, whose Long Lots kindergartner could be affected by the process.

“I really want to urge you not to redistrict,” Clark said during the public-comment portion of Thursday’s school board meeting. “The actual impact on students, whether it’s one or 100, is dramatic.”

Clark said it is his understanding that there is no financial benefit to redistricting and that the process is just an exercise to get ahead of something that might happen.

Scarice was not at the meeting when district consultant Mike Zuba presented scenarios that could relocate up to 5 percent of the district’s 2,400 elementary school students.

On Thursday, Scarice said Zuba was asked by the district to put together sketches of what redistricting might look like, anticipating plans would be questioned.

He said the four scenarios suggested were merely that — “suggestions.”

“The board will not be presented with options until the first week of September [2024],” Scarice said. After at least four subsequent public meetings on the plan, a vote is expected in November on a redistricting plan that would then would be implemented for the start of the 2025-26 school year.

To get to that point, Scarice said staff needs parameters to be established.

Administrators have enrollment and school capacity information. What they lacked, until Thursday, was a set of guiding criteria set by the school board.

That came on a 6-0 vote by board members, supporting the criteria suggested by Scarice.

The guidelines include:

• Ensure no school is over- or underutilized.
• Ensure parity across schools, meaning all buildings have the same number of specialty spaces, such as art rooms, barring year-to-year enrollment blips.
• Provide long-term stability, meaning each school should have sufficient room to accommodate enrollment bubbles and growth.
• Maintain current middle school feeder patterns which keep the two middle schools at a stable 60/40 split for at least the next five years.
• Adhere to natural boundaries and keep neighborhoods together to the greatest extent possible.
• Maintain walking communities where possible.
• Minimize the movement of self-contained special education classes and ensure they move no more than once every five years.
• Make sure no student is moved more than once because of redistricting.
• Consider grandfathering fifth graders affected by the process. 

There was significant sentiment to allow fifth graders to stay put if their parents so choose.

Some wanted to shield fourth graders as well.

“They have invested years in building relationships,” said Natalie Drucker, a Greens Farms Elementary School parent, said of fourth graders potentially affected by redistricting.

“Remember, kids who will be in fourth grade in 2025-26 are the youngest cohort who went through COVID,” Drucker told the board.

Drucker also pointed out that Greens Farms has no enrollment issues of its own. It is factored into the potential process because it borders the Long Lots district.

Board member Abby Tolan asked if, in addition to grandfathering some students to remain at their current schools, some would be allowed to switch before redistricting occurs in anticipation of the expected impact of the new districts.

She was told that would be a gamble since there is no guarantee boundaries adopted under a final plan would be the same as families might expect.

Freelance writer Linda Conner Lambeck, a reporter for more than four decades at the Connecticut Post and other Hearst publications, is a member of the Education Writers Association.