Albuquerque Public Schools: Changing Boundaries, Changing Schools

Changing boundaries, changing schools, an overview of the 1997 Albuquerque Public Schools boundary committees proposed boundary changes. Thank you for joining us. I'm Rick Murray, Director of Community Relations for Albuquerque Public Schools. And this program is about APS's effort to adjust middle and high school boundaries. We know that just the thought of students changing schools after that school has become an important part of a community or a neighborhood since people into a fit of anxiety and panic. The fact is, the majority of households in Albuquerque won't be affected by any of the proposals that you'll see later in this program. What we want to do is give you the necessary information about the proposals, how the boundary committee came up with them, and how you, as a parent of an APS student, can have input into this process. The first

question I get many times is, why do you need to change the boundary? Well, the reason is simple. We need to adjust the boundaries to balance the number of students that go to APS schools. In short, while some schools are experiencing tremendous growth, others are struggling to maintain adequate enrollment. Changing school boundaries many times means changing schools. On the surface, it's an emotional issue that has the potential of tearing a community apart. But deeper than that, it is a process that involves dozens of community members, volunteering hundreds of hours, looking at a plethora of options, trying to recommend where the new school boundaries will be. The changing of school boundaries is only a natural progression when you live in a community like Albuquerque, miles and miles of development, the new homes, the new kids, the overburden schools. They're all ingredients for a tasty dish of reality. For Albuquerqueans, that

reality is growth. It's been ten years since Albuquerque Public Schools has undertaken a boundary change of this magnitude. Although the middle school boundaries only impact the northeast area, all 11 high schools will be impacted by the new high school boundaries. But the one fact that makes this high school boundary change different from any other is that it's the first time APS is changing boundaries because of a decrease in enrollment rather than an increase. That's because Rio Rancho will be opening its own high school in August of 1997, thanks to computer chip giant Intel Corporation. Last year, Santa Valle County granted Intel Corporation $8 billion in industrial revenue bonds. As part of the deal, Intel promised to build a much-needed high school for this city. With nearly two thirds of the 2700 students at a ten-seable high school coming from Rio Rancho, the opening of the new high school is greatly anticipated by both communities.

Well, I'm happy to say that in the August of 96 where we are right now, we are ahead of schedule. So the plan to be ready and open for the fall term of 97, which will be a year from now, we're ahead of schedule and we're going to make that. But we're no longer really a suburb of, we're a community of our own and this high school really underlines that point. On the other side of the coin, middle school boundaries are moving because of growth, particularly growth on the northeast side of Albuquerque. The last middle school built in that area was Eisenhower Middle School more than 20 years ago. With an enrollment of more than 1500 students, Eisenhower is easily the largest middle school in Albuquerque. Three years ago, APS began drafting plans for a new middle school. It is currently under construction and is located just north of Feseo del Norte on Barstow. The yet to be named middle school will be finished and open for business in August of 1997, depending on the final boundary proposal. The new middle school could impact enrollment at Eisenhower, McKinley, Cleveland, Madison and possibly Hoover middle schools.

So how do I get involved? If my student is potentially going to change schools next year, how can I have input to this process here to help me answer some of those questions? It's Pat Duda and Matt Archuleta, a boundary committee member. Thank you for joining us here today. Just Matt, how did you become a boundary committee member and how were all the other committee members selected? Well, the Board of Education has tasked 25 member committee to evaluate and recommend changes. One educator and one alternate are from each cluster, each of the 11 clusters. Each APS board member selected two parents and one alternate to be voting members of the committee. The process is best described by referencing Board of Education policy J01 in the school attendance areas and the list of the committee membership. So how many, what are the numbers on the committee? How many of you are there? We got a lot of you running around? There's 25 of us, including alternates, there's probably 35 total you had in the alternate chair. So it's a pretty good representation.

Yes, we have a real good, and there's a good parent representation there. Wonderful. That's good to hear. Pat, if I can't ask you, how did your committee get to this point? In a minute, we're going to be seeing some of the maps and some of the proposals that your committee came up with. How did you get up to that point? Well, we've been meeting since basically November of last year, and we've got the policy that Matt referred to from the APS board that lists the criteria. We've gotten input from the APS staff as far as the areas of the city where we're seeing growth and decline in student population. We've got input from the transportation people about busing situations and from facilities. We've tried to put all that input together, and then added to that the input we get from the parents and from the cluster schools, the concerns and recommendations, and come up with these options. We've looked at probably over 50 options for middle school and high school together. You say you've been meeting for months and months. Imagine that's had a hard effect on some of your family lives. Well, let's take a look at some of that criteria

if we can take a look at that. We have 10 criteria that if we can get those up on the screen that you guys actually used as your guidelines for that. The first one is the instructionally effective use of each school's physical capacity. How important is that when we start looking at boundaries? When you start looking at having 35, 40 students in a classroom, that's important. That's what we're really looking at is trying to maintain a class size and best utilize the facilities that are currently in place. Now the geographic location, the number two, if we can get that back up there, the geographic location of each school in relationship to the surrounding student population. We'll just keep going through these. The number three is the optimization of safe walking patterns. The fourth is the preservation of neighborhood integrity and I know that was an important part for you guys too. Maintaining the integrity of neighborhoods that were not actually

putting boundaries through neighborhoods but actually on major streets. Number five, equivalents of educational experiences and programs. Number six, achieving the pure feeder concept whenever possible. In APS, we know that's pretty much impossible but we try to keep pretty close to that. Number seven, the promotion of excellence in the quality educational experiences, instructional programs and the other services. Here's one that I thought was really interesting, the enrollment levels, maintaining the appropriate enrollment levels for both the elementary, middle and high schools. Obviously we're not dealing with elementary here today but middle and high schools from six to 1,000 students in the high schools from 1,500 to 2,200 students. Rick, that ties right in with number seven, the promotion of excellence in the quality of educational experience, instructional programs and other services. If you get the numbers too low, you start losing programs. Oh, sure. And that's one thing that we tried to really be concerned about when we were looking at some of the proposals that we had. Okay, very good. That's a good point that if they don't

have the enrollment in the school or in that class for a particular subject, then they can't offer it because they don't have enough students to qualify for classroom and a teacher. That's a good point. I'm glad you brought that up. If we can go back for the last two there, maintaining the social economic or their racial balance at the school, that's obviously very important. And then number 10, changes in the instructional activities at a school creating a need for different space utilization. Now, what we want to do, I guess, what you're saying is that we want to avoid that, correct? Right. Well, we want to look at things, some schools have things like side-by-side programs or maybe they're a magnet school, those types of things. That may affect some of the activities at that particular school and their space utilization requirements, right? Okay. And we'd already discussed a little bit why the boundaries pat were being changed. But can we go a little bit further into that? We're changing both middle and high school boundaries. And let's first take the middle school. Why are we changing boundaries there? Well, we're changing the middle school boundaries because APS has seen a lot of student growth

in the Northeast area and they're building a new middle school at Barstow and Lowell in that area in just north of Pasele del Norte. So we need to obviously set up new boundaries for that new middle school. And when you do that, it'll affect all of the middle schools that have boundaries right now in that area. And really what we're looking at for that area is the growth, which is contrary to why we're changing high school boundaries. And if we may be mad, if you can go into the high school boundaries, what we're looking at, though? Yeah. And the high school boundaries, Sebel has danced to lose 68% of its population. As we did mention maintaining the integrity of the programs that the high schools was real important. So when you lose that many students, you have to shift and you have to move some of the lines and some of the boundaries to get everybody up back to par. With Sebel losing so many students, we have some parts of Albuquerque that are in a no-growth area that we want to make sure that we maintain a student population in those particular

areas also. Let's take a look quickly at the boundary schedule. I mean, we have town hall meetings and I think we need to talk a little bit about that because this is really the process. We're asking people to get involved in to let you guys know what they think about these boundary proposals. So if we can go ahead and put the boundary, excuse me, the boundary meeting schedule, yeah, the town hall meetings. If we've got that available, there we go. On September 5th, we have a boundary meeting. That's basically you guys meeting, is that correct? Right. And although the public is invited to attend these, we would rather not and really wait till the town hall meetings for the meeting. They're always invited to attend their open meetings, however they cannot speak because it is a business meeting. You're very good. And as you see, on the 9th, 10th, September 10th, town hall at Siebel of High School, we go through the 11th, the 12th, the 17th, and the 19th. The town hall meetings, they go from Siebel of Del Norte, Rio Grande, El Dorado, and High School, all of

them starting at 7 o'clock. Now, tell us a process of when we attend those meetings, how can I, as a parent, my student's school is changing? How can I get involved in this town hall meeting? Do I have a process? Can I tell you what I think? Is it set in concrete? Can I tell you guys to move those boundaries? Right. Now, none of the boundaries are set in concrete yet. This is what the point of the town hall meetings is, is to get the public input. Of course, as representatives, we've been trying to do that all along, we've got input, but we need more, we need the public to have a chance to tell us what they think. There's a couple formal ways that they can do this at the town hall meetings. If they are an organized group, they will have a two minute input time, and they can call the facility's master plan office, and you'll probably be showing that number later. You will show that a little bit later. And they can sign up ahead of time so that they get their two minute time period. An organized group can also come at the meeting and sign up, and then any individual can also speak, they will be given one minute time limits. Again, they can call that phone number that

will show you later, or we can just show up at the meeting and sign up to give your input. Now, as we go through this process, and we're going to try to wrap up our questions here as we try to get into the maps, but one thing I know a lot of people will ask us about, what about grandfather? What about transfers? I know these are going to be real questions, because what happens usually in APS is that a lot of times the students that are currently going to a particular school are allowed to finish out their career at that school when you go through boundary changes. Is that going to happen this year? It's up to the Board of Education. The Board of Education kind of carries the ball on that, and all we're doing is proposing the boundary changes, and the Board of Education will work on the grandfather and some of the other things. Okay. I know that as the administration is looking at that, because there is the idea of transportation, and those are some additional costs that would be involved in the idea of the sibling rule. Those are things that are going to be added and talked about as we go down the line in this whole process. I'm going to go ahead and wrap that section

up, and I think what we'd like to do now is go into the actual proposals and how we got to our decisions here as a boundary committee. And as we look here at the first proposal for high school, this is a proposal A high school map. I want to tell you that what we're seeing is in the colored area is the proposed boundary changes, and in the black outlined area is the current boundary changes. And Matt, as we look on the west side at Seabla, and again, this is only Bernalio County. Seabla is growing in Bernalio County, obviously losing all that out of Rio Rancho. That's correct. And parts of Taylor Ranch were actually split and going to West Mesa, Seabla, and Valley High School across the river. Also parts of the North Valley were going down to Del Nori High School. So we've done this, tried to clean it up, and Seabla does have a bigger area. And West Mesa, it's decreased population West Mesa to allow for the growth happening out there also. Okay. And as, I guess we can go on to proposal B because there's really not a lot of difference there as we see Pat

looking between proposal A and proposal B if we can talk a little bit about that. Right. The only change between those two proposals is that we have included another small section in the north to go to Valley rather than to La Cueva along the freeway to the west. And that's basically to match what we'll see as some of our middle school options so that have the same students going in the same direction. And of course La Cueva here has big growth and is a high student population area. So we've decreased the La Cueva area and then tried to adjust the other boundaries to the schools to balance out their student populations as well. Let's take a look at how this is going to affect the enrollment at the high school level if we have that graphic please. Between what we have currently and where we will be in through proposal A and proposal B. As you can see the enrollment for 95, 96 at Avakiri High School was 2256 students. Both proposals are the same for all these and when we see only one number they're not changed between proposal A and proposal B as far

as the enrollment and the boundaries. Is that correct? That's right. Okay. Good. And so Cueva High School you can see is at 2500 students there reducing all the way down to 1600. That's going to be some real joy for Principal Don DeRan out there I'm sure. Yeah that's going to be a real impact on them. And we go through that Del Norte, El Dorado and Highland you can see Luz is also about 200 students. Let's go on to the next page there. La Cueva High School and we can see Valley High School are the only two schools that will be changed between proposal A and proposal B. On La Cueva with their current or their 95, 96 enrollment at 2315 they will be reduced down to either 1867 or 1798 depending on which proposal. And again when we're talking about these numbers these are only proposals and that's why we're going to have these public input meetings to decide where we're going to go at. That's correct. And these numbers also are the students who live in these boundary areas. It does not include things like transfers and that type

of thing. Okay thank you for bringing that up. That's right. It does not include the transfers. So actually these numbers may be a little low when we're looking at the proposed numbers for A and V. That's correct. Okay that's very good. Now we have other maps to look at at the middle school level. We have three proposals. We call those proposals x, y and z if we can go ahead and take a look at proposal x at the middle school level. If we can pet what how did you guys at the boundary committee approach looking at the middle school boundaries? When we're looking at the middle school boundaries we have a very high growth area and a high up population already in that northern area. So we had to try to balance the enrollment and we were looking at natural boundaries and other things like that. Basically we've taken the northern sections of McKinley and Madison to the new middle school and the northern section of Eisenhower and then to balance some enrollment we've moved the line between McKinley and Cleveland a little bit to the east. Very good. And I mentioned at the top in that videotape piece that Hoover would be possibly affected. Hoover is not affected by any of these boundary changes.

So I wanted to make that clear. Let's move on to proposal y then and Matt maybe if you want to talk a little bit about that. That includes a new not only the new high school but also tapped middle school as far as boundary changes with that. Right and there again we're looking at an area just to the west of the freeway there that could go. It's actually right in the middle of both of the mid schools and that's why I could almost go either way but we're also trying to keep the population reasonable at the new mid school and that's why you see the shift a little further to the west on some of the boundaries and there again we've tried to keep all the boundaries together whereas before McKinley was split and some of the other ones were split and doing a lot of transporting of students. And I guess that's a big factor when we look at boundaries is really the cost in transporting students and basically trying to stay at that neighborhood school. It really is and the legislature has decreased the funding for transportation so that's one thing it really

had to take in consideration in this. Very good. Very good. Okay let's go ahead and look at the last one, the proposal z. And interesting proposal on this one here is that the middle school boundary has grown much larger on this path. Can you talk a little bit about this proposal z? Right on this middle school boundary we've had a lot of input from the parents in that area and they want to try to have a feeder system so that those schools go into that middle school and so we've been tried to include all of the walk area and a lot more of that community. We've still cut it off at the freeway on the west side so that those students will go to taft. In doing so we can't meet all of the criteria. We have to weigh one over another and once again with that high enrollment up at the top we've taken some students from the bottom schools so we've had to move those boundaries to also adjust the enrollment at the schools in the southern area. Okay let's take a look at the the enrollment figures through how this would look for the middle school boundary changes and we as we can see the proposals x, y and z and how the boundaries and the enrollments change for freech of them through all of them. Is

there any significance we can draw from any of these numbers right here? Cleveland looks like it remains pretty steady as far as their numbers, Eisenhower. They stay pretty steady. We know that we're going to we didn't put the current enrollment on here because of the I guess we would really looking at some some delineations because of transfers and everything else but we're looking at how it looks after the boundaries have been changed. So all of them look like they stay pretty steady except for between the proposal z there at McKinley and then the new middle school where we can see where a lot of those students through that large increased boundary for the middle school would be seen quite a few more students there. That's right the APS criteria for middle schools is 600 to a thousand students so you can see that proposal z does drop McKinley lower than that and the new ones higher. Okay I think it's all we need to look at those

is there any final thoughts as we start to close up our program. I know that as parents start looking at these now if they're going to say now if I finally agree on a boundary are these boundaries ever going to change again? Can you answer that? The boundaries will probably always be in a change process. Albuquerque's in the growth area we're always going to experience growth in different parts of Albuquerque you see some growth and some decline in student population so the boundaries probably will change again when we can't predict that but it's just a changing process. And we are looking here at trying to establish high school boundaries for a 10 year period so we are trying to make boundaries that will last for some time so we're trying to take that growth into consideration. What has been the general feeling of the boundary committee as you've worked through this process we've said earlier that you all looked at more than 50 options both between middle and high school. What has been the whole attitude and the feeling it with the boundary committee it's obviously a lot of people probably some some spirited discussion

that has happened but obviously you guys are still friends and you're still talking each other. Yeah that's because we're on camera. No we've had some very spirited debates and whenever you talk about changing where students are going to school it comes out and people have been real good at contacting their representatives and letting them know and we do urge the parents to attend the town halls it is real important to get more parental input we have had you know some good input on the committee but we value getting more input from the community. So now we're going through this program people hopefully will be getting in touch with your committee or at least you'll be getting input from them. What is that input going to look like do you think? What do you think you're going to be seeing after? Well I think we're going to get a lot of the parents concerns and why they think that they should go to a particular school or not or where boundaries should be changed and we welcome that kind of input. We'll be taking these proposals and all the input that we get from them and then trying to massage these to come up with

one proposal that looks good for both high school and middle school that we can recommend to the superintendent and then basically to the APS Board of Education which makes the final decision on this. Well that's yeah I'm glad you brought that up that really what you're doing as a committee is coming up with recommendations and proposals that would be finally passed on to the Board of Education who then would say yes or no hopefully with all the time that you spent that they would take your word for it I guess. Exactly and we also feel like we're going to get a lot of positive feedback from what we've proposed because you know with with the parents that we have had I think a feeling of the community and what what the needs are so I feel like we'll be a lot of positive feedback on the proposals. So as a parent who may be affected by this boundary change I don't need to have a heart attack if I looked at this and said oh my gosh you know I don't like what I see here I'm actually going to have some input on this thing. Exactly. I guess what we need to do is let people know how they can get more information as far as copies of what these proposals are.

They can contact the facilities master plan APS facilities master plan at 912 Locust Street Northeast and I think we have a billboard that says that that's Albuquerque New Mexico 8706 and the phone number there is 7655950 and that's extension 261 now you can write or call this number or this information so you can get boundary information. That's right you can get boundary options that we've seen here the proposals that we've seen you can also call that number to sign up to say that you want to give either a one minute or two minute presentation at the town hall meeting and you can get the names of your district representatives if you want to contact them directly. Okay very good. Any closing thoughts from our panel here as we've discussed most of these questions here. I guess maybe what we would like to ask is that everybody watching this and everybody wanting to have input to please show up to our boundary meetings in the town hall meetings. That's right come to our town hall meetings give us your input there

contact the parents as the district representatives in your district and then you can also contact your cluster representatives if you're going through the school process to give us more input on how these proposals look to you. And I think finally one final note I think we can make on this is that this is really a positive process for Albuquerque and Albuquerque public schools and the fact that we're getting a new middle school and we're at Rio Rancho is getting a new high school that's great for them and we're all proud of them and helping us out with that our problem at Seable High School so this is really going to be a positive process and as we work through it I think it's all going to to work out well. All right I think that'll conclude us here for our 1996 boundary presentation changing boundaries changing schools thanks for joining us.