Border War Heats Up In Cda Schools Map

It’s every neighborhood for itself.

A cross-town feud is brewing over the two boundary options on the discussion agenda at the Coeur d’Alene School District’s public forum tonight.

The complex boundaries have been carved up two different ways - Options A and B.

Option A uses U.S. Highway 95 and Interstate 90 as the basic boundary guidelines, following the idea that every child attend the nearest school.

Option B would bus children from Indian Meadows, Woodside Park and the Fruitland neighborhoods seven miles across town, even though they live just over a mile from the new middle school. It would keep a neighborhood known as “the Borah triangle” in the Canfield District, while Option A would shift those students to Lakes Middle School.

The boundaries committee has been meeting weekly for two months to draw attendance lines for the existing middle schools. Those lines will change next fall when a new middle school opens.

Both plans keep the population of each school below 750 but would allow for growth in the northwest and northeast areas of the district.

Specific proposed street boundaries for each school are posted at Lakes and Canfield middle schools and the administrative center.

Four families in the Indian Meadows and Woodside Park subdivisions have expressed written concern that excessive busing proposed in Option B impedes safety and could have an economic impact.

“It will be difficult to convince prospective buyers with young children to buy in a neighborhood where the children have to be bused all the way across town, compared to an area where the kids attend a neighborhood school,” said the letter, signed by four families.

Russ Hansen, a Woodside Park resident, said most families in his neighborhood assumed their children would attend the new middle school off Kathleen Avenue because of its close proximity.

“But looking at these boundaries, it becomes very obvious there’s some special interest groups served by Option B,” Hansen said Wednesday. “I don’t see how a parent can justify saying this is what we want so we are going to bus your kids across town. I don’t know how they can do that with a straight face.”

Sending children to the school they are nearest to minimizes busing and family disruption, Hansen maintains.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: MEETING The forum on school boundaries begins tonight at 7 in the Lakes Middle School library.