After months of collecting community feedback, the Fostering Diverse Schools initiative has produced the first three sets of potential residential boundaries for students, staff, and families to consider.
FDS is the result of a grant program worth nearly $1 million to modernize the district’s residential zones. The current boundaries have gone mostly untouched for about three decades, far longer than most of the state’s school districts, so it’s past time to make changes that will make transportation routes more efficient, reduce overcrowding and underenrollment, maintain feeder patterns between grade levels, and diversify schools along socioeconomic lines.
Over 11,000 people weighed in during the feedback process up to this point, and the district is prepared to answer common concerns. No new maps will be implemented until at least the 2026-27 school year, and no students will be removed from schools they currently attend. The initiative also won’t involve bussing students longer distances – in fact, commute times should become significantly shorter.
The three proposed sets of maps each address current problems to different degrees. Map A significantly increases socioeconomic diversity, while Map B is slightly less diverse but has much more efficient transportation routes and more consistent feeder patterns, and Map C sacrifices more diversity for a bit more transportation efficiency. None of the proposed maps will have too many or too few students in a zone by default.
Maps will be revised again at the end of the spring and won’t go to the Board of Education for a vote until August, so there’s still plenty of time to offer feedback. Students, parents, and families are encouraged to go online starting today to review the maps and use the FDS webpage’s interactive tools to learn how each option would affect them.
From there, they can fill out a survey detailing their opinions. They can also attend any of the 11 upcoming listening sessions meant to keep soliciting feedback and improving maps before the new boundaries are finalized.
The proposed maps are available for review now at https://maps.wsfcsvoices.org/.
