The following is an op-ed piece from Delegates Kathy Szeliga and Ryan Nawrocki.
We have been closely following the Northeast and Central Middle School Redistricting process over the past months. This contentious decision will impact the lives 30,000+ students potentially attending 10 schools. Former superintendent Darryl Williams initiated the boundary study in spring 2022 to alleviate overcrowding and determine who will attend the new $100 million Northeast school to open in the Fall of 2024 on King Avenue in Rosedale. However, he chose not to seek renewal of his contract and will not see it through to the end himself. While we assumed the newly appointed superintendent would be the one to implement the approved boundary study, instead, the Baltimore County Board of Education did not finalize the redistricting plan on Tuesday night.
After months of work facilitated by an outside consultant, the Board of Education has had the chance to review the data from various map options, community input meetings, boundary committee discussions, and thousands of messages on a public comment forum. However, in the eleventh hour, a school board member made a motion to amend the proposed final map by moving students from Halstead Academy to go to Dumbarton Middle School instead of Loch Raven Academy. We are very disappointed that the board did not vote to approve or deny the final option.
READ MORE: Councilman David Marks’ response to the Board of Education’s decision
Now, the committee has to do an impact study on how this change will look before the board can come to a final decision with no scheduled date established. This frustrates us alongside the many parents who have participated in the process from the beginning. There have been plenty of opportunities for this suggestion to come up ahead of the final vote. This raises a concern that Dumbarton will be the next school requesting an emergency boundary study. A precedent has been set for this to take place after the previous Baltimore County boundary study that resulted in overcrowding at Hampton Elementary which then needed an emergency study to remedy the problem. The decision to not vote last night discredits the months of time and effort put into the boundary study by the Committee volunteers and attempts to upend their recommendation with no data, supporting documentation, or rational reasoning.
The elected officials have stressed during this entire process that these determinations can also influence property values and, consequently, the lives of many more people than the families directly redistricted. It is unconscionable that the Board of Education would tamper with the lives of thousands of children and potentially impact all of these communities outside of the approved boundary study process. If large changes to the boundary map are back on the table, the delegates and councilman ask for another review to take place on the Bowleys Quarters/Middle River/White Marsh area feeder schools. A portion of Vincent Farm Elementary’s population is proposed to be redistricted to the new middle school on King Avenue and significant changes are being made to Chase Elementary and Seneca Elementary as well. For example, the proposed map will combine some of these children with the students currently enrolled at Golden Ring Middle – an entire school population that is consolidating upon the opening of the new building. We believe this was another decision with little transparency given to the public. This impact is monumental and should be reviewed with community input more carefully. Only two community input meetings took place and they were located in Towson and Parkville – locations not remotely close to the Eastern Baltimore County neighborhoods impacted by these decisions.
We have already voiced previously that the most concerning part of the boundary study process was the misinterpretation of the governing rules detailed in Policy 1280 III B. The policy states that any school boundary committee members must include “two parents from each of the affected schools which the school principal recommends.” Unfortunately, the 46 elementary schools potentially affected by the boundary changes did not have ANY representation on the committee. Only current middle school families were included in this workgroup. We are concerned that this specific boundary study aimed to accomplish more than what could be reasonably managed simultaneously. This study sought to alleviate overcrowding, fill a new school building, close another school, and move all students currently enrolled in English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) programs back to their home schools. That requires multiple shifting parts and an enormous impact on many families across Baltimore County. If the boundary study had not been so large, could there have been an equal representation of elementary school parents on the voting committee? Discovering that boundary committee members did not have attendance requirements for the public input sessions has been very disconcerting. And more importantly, they were not required to be in attendance at voting sessions. That means that the middle school parents that were meant at least to represent the neighborhood communities of elementary school parents were not indeed required to be present for the entirety of the process. Also, a voting member of the boundary committee was just recently appointed to the Board of Education and given two times the weight of decision-making compared to the hundreds of parents who felt they have never been heard.
Baltimore County students, parents, teachers, and community members deserve better.
