A new elementary school under construction means Santa Maria-Bonita School District leaders must tackle a big challenge — crafting new boundary lines to determine student attendance at their 21 campuses.
“It’s a complex puzzle where the shapes are changing as you’re trying to put them together is really how it works,” Deputy Superintendent Matt Beecher said after board members responded to his presentation with, ‘It’s not easy.”
He added that the district has access to good tools using a map program from consultant SchoolWorks, providing the ability to select and identify how many students would be affected by each move.
The new school to house kindergartners through sixth-graders sits on a 10.76-acre site between College, Shepard and Meehan drives in the Enos Ranch area.
Funding came from the $45 million Measure T, which was adopted by voters in 2014 to upgrade the 19 older campuses and build a new school.
The 60,000-square-foot campus will include 31 new classrooms, a learning lab, a special education student center, eight learning commons, an 11,000-square-foot multipurpose room, and a 2,400-square-foot library.
Construction on the campus, which includes a two-story building, began in February, and should be done for students to fill classrooms in August 2020.
School attendance boundaries talks can be among the most controversial and impactful actions taken by a district, as it likely will require some students to switch to a new campus.
Santa Maria-Bonita last redrew school attendance boundaries in 2015 ahead of opening the district’s 20th campus, Jimenez Elementary School.
The goal involves carving the community to evenly distribute students among the elementary and junior high schools, while providing predictability to families and allowing for potential growth in the community.
During a presentation on Wednesday night, Beecher issued a disclaimer at the start — and repeated it — to remind people that the process remains in the early stages, with no decisions determined yet.
“These are preliminary scenarios that we use to test the options and give School Works to examine against our larger goals. We’re not asking for a street-by-street review or approval at this time,” Beacher said. “Another disclaimer is, I don’t think this is the last time you’ll see the disclaimer.”
Scenarios revealed Wednesday night included looking at converting some kindergarten-through-sixth-grade schools to instead see kindergarten through eighth grades.
Converting four campuses to K-8 didn’t appear practical due to the effects on capacity at elementary schools, but the concept of converting two campuses to K-8 did seem favorable, Beecher said.
Those campuses could be Jimenez Elementary School, which had started looking at options to keep dual-language students at the campus after sixth grade, and Taylor Elementary School.
“Those two schools make some sense because both have gym-size cafeterias,” Beecher said. “Both would then be providing relief to the more-impacted junior highs.”
The district has approximately 17,000 students from transitional kindergarten through eighth grade.
Even with the new school, Santa Maria-Bonita expects to have approximately 15 of the largest campuses in Santa Barbara County, Beecher said.
He said he will work with the consultant to craft specific maps with boundaries for each school, with one scenario keeping the current configurations to find a workable solution.
They also will examine a second scenario exploring converting two schools to K-8 campuses to give relief to junior high campuses experiencing the most pressure.
The Measure T school’s first principal has been identified as Colleen Lathery, who now leads Rice Elementary School.
Also Wednesday night, the board picked Meteor Education to provide furniture for the Measure T school, with between $1.3 and $2 million expected for that project.
The community will have to wait a bit longer for another key part of opening a new school — picking a name.
In early 2020, the district expects to launch that process by soliciting suggestions from the community before a committee narrows the options, with the board making the final choice in the spring, following the same steps used with Jimenez Elementary, honoring immigrant brothers.
— Noozhawk North County editor Janene Scully can be reached at jscully@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.