Parents get voice in boundary changes

Groups of Post Falls School District parents unhappy with how the district has redrawn elementary school attendance boundaries have crafted their own proposals for reallocating students when a new elementary school opens this fall.

District officials are listening, but making no commitments about changing their plan.

“My promise has been I will take all issues into consideration,” said Post Falls School District Superintendent Jerry Keane.

One new parent-driven plan leaves more Ponderosa Elementary and Prairie View Elementary students at the schools they currently attend, but does not do as much as the district’s proposal to address crowding in those two schools.

Among other adjustments, the district’s proposal calls for moving Prairie View students living east of Highway 41 to Ponderosa Elementary. Some students on the west end of the Ponderosa area would be moved to the new West Ridge Elementary.

Ponderosa parent Carolyn Callister lives within that area near the Post Falls water tower. She has two children who attend Ponderosa and a 3-year-old she hopes will one day also go there. Callister gathered signatures from more than 100 other parents opposing the school district’s proposal.

She and other water tower-area parents also drafted a proposal of their own.

That proposal (called “option 3” on the district’s Web site) would move some of the Prairie View children to Ponderosa, but leave most at their current school. All students currently within Ponderosa’s attendance boundaries would continue to go there.

“I am so happy about it. Maybe someone actually listened to me,” said Callister of the district’s willingness to float her option on its Web site. Still, she remained cautious about getting her hopes up to high, however, since her map comes late in the boundary redrawing process.

Both Callister’s map and the district’s proposal would put Ponderosa enrollment at about 505 students, but Callister’s proposal would place 517 students at Prairie View while the district’s would lower that number to 457.

Keane said he worries that growth in the Prairie View area could mean another boundary change within a couple years if the number of students at the school isn’t reduced now.

Another parent-drawn option would keep many current elementary school boundaries closer to their current configurations, but it would also create an isolated strip of Seltice Elementary School students north of the Ponderosa boundaries.

All three proposals are available for review on the district’s Web site www.pfsd.com.

“All through this we said we’d listen to all ideas,” Keane said.

Whether one of the parents’ proposals passes muster won’t be known until Keane makes a recommendation to the school board later this month.

Keane said his recommendation will be designed to meet the key objectives of the process. Top on that list is to reduce overcrowding. Second on the list is to move as few students as possible, and third is to keep boundaries geographically sound allowing as many students as possible to walk to school.

Callister is grateful that Keane has listened to her suggestions but she worries that parents may not be fully heard in the process since all of the board members did not attend the public meetings on the boundary changes.

“They’re just going to rubber-stamp the district’s proposal,” she said.