New High School Brings Changes In Boundaries

Pine River Park resident Ric Gaunt is familiar with the routine: every time Mead School District boundaries are redrawn, the students in his small neighborhood north of Wandermere Golf Course are bounced to new elementary and middle schools.

“There are only about four kids per class, and you keep putting them in a new school,” said Gaunt, who has sons in eighth, fifth and second grade. “That just isn’t right.”

The latest boundary changes, proposed because of the opening of a second Mead high school next year, keep with tradition.

The Mead School Board hosted the first of a pair of public forums on a pair of boundary change proposals Monday night. The two proposed plans were relatively simple, which Rich Fink, a Mead resident who helped draw the plans, said was deceiving.

“We went through two inches of paperwork to get it to this,” said Fink, waving a six-page plan.

Both proposed plans would significantly alter current boundaries, turning attendance areas for the middle and high schools from a north-south division to an east-west axis.

In both plans, Northwood Junior High and Mead High School would take all students living west of the Little Spokane River and Highway 395. A small pocket of students living west of Highway 2 and south of Farwell Road would also attend Northwood and Mead High.

Everyone else would attend Mead Junior High and Mount Spokane High School.

The differences between the two plans: in Plan A, Pine River Park students would attend the same schools as they do now, and Evergreen Elememtary students would be kept with their neighborhood friends. The district would rely on out-of-district transfers - about 11 per grade - to keep enrollments balanced between the two middle and high schools.

Plan B would break up the Pine River Park and Evergreen neighborhoods, but enrollments would be balanced.

Balancing enrollments is important because significant differences in enrollment numbers would mean one high school could offer more electives and gifted and remedial classes, Mead administrator Al Swanson.

“You don’t want one school to be seen as better” than the other, Swanson said.

The plans drew criticism and praise from various interests. Parents were concerned about youths driving from the Evergreen attendance area in Country Homes to Mount Spokane High School on Peone Prairie.

Other parents in Colbert, Midway and Meadow Ridge elementary areas were concerned that the intense youth soccer competition would splinter when Midway students were pulled to Mead High School and students from the other schools to Mount Spokane.

Pine River Park resident Janet Stumph was upset that her neighborhood was targeted again. “This happened when they changed everything in ‘92,” Stumph said.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: BOUNDARY CHANGES A community meeting to discuss proposed Mead School District boundary changes will be held today at 7 p.m. in the Mead High School cafeteria. For copies of the plans, call the Mead administration offices at 468-3000.