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LUSD planning to redraw attendance boundaries
The lines are being redrawn in Lodi.
Those lines are a part of the new Lodi Unified School District plan to redraw high school attendance area boundaries. With the impending 2005 arrival of Ronald E. McNair High School, the district's three main high school campuses will each lose some territory. Two of them will also gain new neighborhoods.
Drawing up new lines is multidimensional, district officials say.
"It's based on geography and enrollment balance," said Dennis Brown, assistant superintendent of secondary education.
The LUSD Board of Education heard the presentation at its meeting Tuesday. Although the proposal is the direction in which the district is going, the plan is not final, Brown said.
"Nothing is set in stone," he said. "It's a regular task -- there's constant re-evaluation."
Three public forums to discuss the proposed boundaries are tentatively scheduled in May. The proposal, with any revisions, will be brought to the board again Aug. 3.
Under the current proposal, the new McNair High attendance area will include a large minority population. Projections from Lodi Unified predict that 45 percent of McNair's student population in 2007 will be of Asian descent. Hispanic students will make up 28 percent of the school, blacks will make up 13 percent and 12 percent of the school's students will be non-Hispanic whites.
Tokay High will become mostly Hispanic and white, with a projected 45 percent of Hispanics and 43 percent of non-Hispanic whites among the student body. Ten percent of the school will be Asian and 1 percent will be black.
Lodi High will have a majority of non-Hispanic whites, with 56 percent of the students being of that ethnicity. Hispanics will make up 37 percent of the student population.
Bear Creek High will become heavily diverse, according to the projections. Asians will make up 31 percent, non-Hispanic white will make up 26 percent, Hispanics will make up 24 percent and black students will make up 18 percent of the student population.
The proposal shows McNair's boundaries as Eight Mile Road on the north, East Hammer Lane on the south, North Alpine Road on the east and the Union Pacific Railroad line on the west. Much of the North Stockton area that McNair will inherent currently falls in the Tokay High attendance area.
Tokay High will in turn extend its northern attendance boundary from West Vine Street to West Lodi Avenue between Crescent Avenue and Highway 99, inheriting that neighborhood's students from Lodi High. Its northern boundary between Crescent Avenue and Lower Sacramento Road will move north to Tokay Street.
Tokay High will also gain the students of the western rural areas of the district from Bear Creek. Bear Creek's attendance area will not increase at all.
Also projected by the school district are attendance figures up to the 2007-08 school year, which is when McNair High will be fully integrated.
McNair will have the largest student body, with 2,405 projected students. Tokay, currently the most heavily attended LUSD high school, will drop from 2,805 students this year to 2,095 in 2007-08.
Lodi High will drop to 2,133 students from 2,676 and Bear Creek will go from 2,470 to 2,141 students during the four-year transition period. The projections account for new housing projects throughout the area.
GATE pilot set to take off
The controversial Gifted and Talented Education pilot program designed to develop onsite services at underrepresented schools will begin next year after being approved by a 5-2 vote.
The decision was not without dissension, however.
"This is the patch we have put on the problem," Trustee Ken Davis said. "I hope it holds."
Superintendent Bill Huyett defended the legitimacy of the pilot program.
"I predict this program will be looked upon very positively," Huyett said.
The program will consist of clustering third- and fourth-grade students tagged as "high-potential" in classrooms at several district schools that traditionally turn out a small percentage of students to the GATE program. The program will be monitored throughout the three years it is slated to be administered. "Clustering provides special instruction with general education classrooms," said John Coakley, the district's GATE coordinator.
No more uniforms
The board also approved by a 6-1 vote rescinding school uniform policies at Delta Sierra Middle School and Sutherland Elementary.
Surveys by parent groups this year at each school showed that more than 70 percent of parents disapprove of current uniform policies at the campuses.
The end of uniforms at the two schools reduces the number of Lodi Unified schools with policies in place to 11. It is unknown whether or not other schools will follow the route of Delta Sierra and Sutherland. No schools rescinded policies last year, but two did in 2001-02.
Catherine Pennington, the assistant superintendent of elementary education, said that no other schools currently have plans to change policies.
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