By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A St. Joseph School Board work session this afternoon might not take a step forward in changing school district boundaries.
In fact, school Superintendent Gabe Edgar will advise the board to take a step back.
“There won’t be any recommendation,” Edgar tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post in a phone interview. “There won’t be any sort of vote or move forward. We’re kind of going to slow down the process, because we can get the feeder patterns correct and we can make things more equitable, but at this time it’s really hard to right-size.”
Edgar will advise the board to consider all the St. Joseph School District schools before recommending boundary changes. Edgar says all the school boundaries, from pre-kindergarten to high school, need to be taken into account before boundaries can be considered equitable and balanced.
The school board called the work session to discuss the controversial issue of changing school boundaries.
Edgar says administrators met Monday to discuss options and have concluded that the district and the school board need to think long-range, perhaps five to seven years, and consider all the school boundaries, not just the kindergarten through 8th Grade boundaries.
Edgar says the administration will be looking for guidance from the school board this afternoon.
“To see whether they want us to continue to bring them a recommendation to change boundaries, but they need to understand the boundaries right now can’t right-size the school district,” according to Edgar.
Edgar says the district needs to settle on a consistent middle school pattern and must create a feeder system that reduces the imbalances of student populations for the three high schools, with Central being much larger than both Benton and Lafayette.
Edgar says neglect over a number of years has caused school populations to be imbalanced, leading some schools to be crowded while others have room.
“Those buildings were built, a lot of them were built as neighborhood schools that don’t have the neighborhoods that they had before,” Edgar says.
School boundaries haven’t shifted with the shift in population.
“So, there are a lot of underlying factors there, but absolutely that’s exactly what happened,” Edgar says. “This has been problem, I’ve only been here six years, it’s been a problem since I’ve been here and I would venture to say it’s been a problem for over 40 years.”