The community has provided plenty of feedback to help reshape Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools’ residential school zones. The first set of proposed boundary maps will be available for public review beginning February 25. The next public feedback sessions will begin the following day.
The district received a nearly $1 million US Department of Education Fostering Diverse Schools grant to put towards reevaluating residential boundaries, which have remained largely untouched for 30 years and are no longer serving families well as the county has grown. The grant program will allow the district to diversify schools along socioeconomic lines and improve the efficiency of bus routes so that everyone can get to school in a timelier manner.
“Socioeconomic diversity is important, but that’s not the only reason we’re doing it. We’re also very focused on modernizing our boundaries, trying to meet a state mandate that we have efficient transportation routes,” said Frank Pantano, the district’s executive director of choice and magnet schools. “From an operations perspective, we need to do this work one way or another.”
District staff and community engagement consultants have completed two rounds of public feedback initiatives, and nearly 11,000 people have weighed in via surveys, listening sessions, and more.
Chief Equity Officer Effie McMillian says that a few key patterns have arisen. There was a lot of common ground among participants, who wanted quality teachers, strong social connections for students, and better support for children who need it. Many raised issues of bullying, the need for improved transportation, and concerns about school overcrowding.
Participants who were excited about rezoning sited inequities in schools and felt socioeconomic diversity could benefit school funding and the well-being of students. Participants who were concerned about redistricting cited issues about longer bus rides, socioeconomic diversity negatively impacting academic outcomes, or taking students out of schools families like.
“We don’t want to go back to busing kids long distances from their homes,” McMillian said. “Part of this process is about reducing, to the greatest extent possible, the average time that it would take families to get their child to school.”
New residential boundaries would be phased in over time. No students would be required to leave schools they already attend.
As for academic concerns, a rich body of data suggests that all students benefit when schools are more socioeconomically diverse. Over the past decade, groups like the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the American Psychological Association, the Century Foundation, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Learning Policy Institute, and more have all published studies that factored into Fostering Diverse Schools research.
These studies connected higher socioeconomic diversity to more consistent academic success across income levels, lower rates of suspension, better teacher retention, greater parent engagement in schools, and students who demonstrate more skills in leadership, creativity, teamwork, and critical thinking.
The 2015 book “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” by Robert D. Putnam argues that diverse schools lead to lower rates of poverty among students of all backgrounds because of greater access to strong educational foundations. The Harvard study even found that students from more socioeconomically diverse schools were more likely to participate in civic activities later in life, creating a generational pattern of community enrichment.
Many participants in the feedback sessions were excited that their students would have access to schools with greater socioeconomic diversity under future maps. They also mentioned previous experiences with overcrowding on some campuses and unequitable access to district resources as reasons they were supportive of changing residential boundaries.
“A large number of people in the community have said that socioeconomic diversity is a very valuable thing for our schools,” McMillian said. “The community is very much in support that resources should be directed where they’re really needed.”
Read more about what community members had to say during the feedback round by reviewing the Phase II Community Feedback report at https://maps.wsfcsvoices.org/phase2-summary.
Community members will have the opportunity from February 25 through spring to respond to the first three proposed maps online or during a community review session. Community feedback will be used to revise and refine the boundary options before going back to the Board of Education for its consideration later this year.
The team is looking forward to more productive conversations on their way to providing students with the best residential boundaries to help them learn and succeed.
“I’ve talked to a lot of families who are very excited about this work, and I’ve talked to a lot of families who are very upset about this work,” Pantano said. “I’ve talked to both groups, and usually, they end up being really good conversations both times.”
Visit the Fostering Diverse Schools web page for more information.