BY MARK J. CRAWFORD
Telegraph Editor
STARKE — No public comments were received on the proposed new zones for Bradford’s elementary schools during a hearing held on Monday.
According to Assistant Superintendent Karen Clarke, letters are ready to go out to parents pending the board’s vote to approve the new zones at its April 10 meeting.
The zones and timeline for notifying parents were discussed during the board’s retreat workshop earlier in the day.
Letters will inform families which school their students are zoned to attend and let them know that fifth-graders assigned to sixth grade at another school will be allowed to remain at their current school if they choose. Doing so would avoid two consecutive years of transition when they move to the middle school for seventh grade. Parents will be provided a form to let the district know they want their student to remain at their current school.
There will also be a general school choice form for parents to request an out-of-zone school. However, Clarke said it will take some time before the results of those requests are known.
“It’s not so much about the capacity of the school,” she said. “It’s about the capacity of the teachers we have.”
A school campus may have room for more students, but that doesn’t mean there is space in a particular grade group, and board members agreed the district cannot hire more teachers to satisfy special requests.
While parents made no showing at the public hearing, they have been reaching out to school board members with questions. Clarke provided some answers.
For example, a family seeking exceptions to attend an out-of-zone school with a second-grader and a fourth-grader might find that the fourth-grader is approved and the second-grader is not because there wasn’t space for more students in that grade level.
Similarly, while fifth-graders are being offered an exemption to stay at their current school next year, that would not apply to siblings in younger grades. Space for them to remain at their current school cannot be guaranteed.
Parents also need to know that selecting an out-of-zone school means the district will not be able to provide transportation.
Clarke said the district must make sure that there is capacity for families moving into a particular area, because their students will be automatically zoned to attend that school.
According to Clarke, many students are already attending out-of-zone schools and the new zones may settle that for them.
“We don’t know that until we get the kids in the schools, figure out who wants to go where, and then let it shake out from there,” she said.
“At the end of the day, I think we all want people to go to school where they want to go to school,” Clarke said.
Parents should receive their zone notification letters by the third week in April — at least those with verified addresses. The district will publish the information in other ways to reach the other 30% or so of families without verified addresses.
