School board’s first look at rezoning maps focuses on diversity
BY AMBER THIBODAUX
ALACHUA COUNTY, Fla. – The Alachua County School Board held a workshop on August 16 to discuss the first set of proposed maps for the 2024-25 comprehensive district-wide rezoning.
Chief of Equity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement Anntwanique Edwards presented the proposed maps along with the methodology her staff used to determine the new zoning lines, including transportation challenges, school capacity, and magnet/program enrollment. Edwards said that an interactive map will be provided by the end of this week that will allow parents to input their address and determine their child’s zoned school.
The maps presented to the board can be found here.
Staff focused on transportation challenges
Edwards began by addressing the district’s transportation challenges and how those ongoing challenges influenced the redrawing of the maps. She said the cost of gas, travel safety for children, and current bus routes were all considered. Given the district’s bus driver shortage, travel efficiency was a top priority. She also prioritized two-mile walk zones so that students who walk to school would not be rezoned, putting further strain on bus routes.
Edwards told the board that certain students would be exempt from the rezoning process: those who are going into fifth, eighth, and twelfth grades for the 2024-25 school year would be “grandfathered” in and excluded from changing schools, along with any student enrolled in a magnet program.
School board members concerned about diversity
Board Member Kay Abbitt said she felt there was a lack of diversity on first review of the maps but later clarified that she also thinks it’s important to keep communities together.
“You’re probably not going to see the diversity that you want to see across schools,” Edwards responded to Abbitt. “We can diversify, but the more we diversify, we will also be increasing the busing routes.”
Edwards asked for clear guidance on priorities for rezoning and referenced the two-mile walk zone requirement as a hindrance to diversity. She said her staff is working on a demographic analysis, which will soon be presented to the board with a racial and socioeconomic breakdown of each school so that “we know what is happening in each one of those zones.”
“There has to be an overall and over-arching priority”
Edwards again stressed the importance of the board unifying in their priorities for rezoning so staff can bring back maps in line with those priorities: “One of the things I have struggled with is to be able to get the complete board’s focus on what the priority is and not individual priorities.”
“I can’t please each individual board member and their priorities… there has to be an overall and over-arching priority,” Edwards continued.
Board Member Sarah Rockwell said she’s also concerned about schools becoming less diverse with the new zone lines and told Edwards that at least three of the five board members previously identified their main focus on creating “SES (socioeconomic status) balance.”
Rockwell added that “beyond balancing enrollment and keeping our two-mile walk zones” for efficiency, SES balance should be prioritized in order to “course-correct” some of the issues caused by switching over to neighborhood schools during the last rezoning. According to the Alachua County Public Schools website, the last comprehensive rezoning was done in 1983, with only limited rezoning efforts since then.
“When we start looking at [whether we can] remove one bus stop or make this bus route two minutes shorter – if that’s going to mean that our schools are less diverse, then I’m not in favor of that,” Rockwell said.
“I told you I’m not for neighborhood schools”
Chair Tina Certain agreed with Rockwell and mentioned Parker Elementary specifically becoming less diverse with the new zones. “I told you I’m not for neighborhood schools – I wasn’t for it back in ’03 and I’m not for it now, but I do understand that we just can’t bus as much because we don’t have drivers, and the financial constraints,” Certain said.
Certain said she was concerned about “creating really high-poverty schools where nobody wants to work in them.” She also pointed out the difficulty in hiring teachers for schools that are “challenging to work in” because those schools have high concentrations of students living in poverty.
Certain said this has been an unaddressed issue for many years. “We put a lot of students in those schools and created high-need learning environments, and then we’re not pulling the levers that we could pull to hire [teachers],” she reminded the board.
Rockwell requests alternative maps
Rockwell encouraged Edwards and her staff to come back with alternative rezoning maps and the implications of each map, as well as methodology and data to back up those conclusions, while also taking into account school capacity and SES balance: “We’re talking about where children go to school, which heavily impacts the entire community.”
Rockwell then stated that the single set of proposed maps made it seem like the maps are a “foregone conclusion” and that if she were just a community member, she would see no point in coming to the community input sessions because the impression is that the decision has already been made. She repeatedly emphasized the importance of having more data and an impact analysis in order to make informed decisions on the final maps.
Board Member Diyonne McGraw acknowledged the overwhelming process of district-wide rezoning and suggested the board focus on rezoning elementary schools first; alleviating overcrowding at Fort Clarke Middle School by moving children over to Westwood Middle; and duplicating the Entrepreneurship Magnet Program at Buchholz High School elsewhere, due to its popularity.
Abbitt emphasizes addressing disparities in teaching personnel
Abbitt addressed the disparities in campus conditions and teaching personnel across the district once more, pointing out that relocating students across town would not always help them perform better. “When we’re moving kids from Northeast Gainesville to Southwest or Northwest Gainesville, they are not doing any better in those schools than the kids that are in Northeast Gainesville,” Abbitt said.
“The biggest job that we have is getting our schools where they need to be,” Abbitt added.
Superintendent Shane Andrew advised the board to consider new residential construction and projected development of neighborhoods throughout the district when drawing up zoning lines, as well as opportunities to use existing facilities currently not being utilized, including Prairie View.
Revitalization at Littlewood and Westwood will add capacity
The following slide highlights additional factors used in determining the new zoning, including new construction at Littlewood Elementary and Westwood Middle, the expansion of school voucher programs, and increases in charter schools. The slide also proposes reducing seats in magnet programs for incoming freshmen.
When Littlewood Elementary and Westwood Middle are complete, they will have additional capacity that is anticipated to alleviate some of the overcrowding issues at nearby schools.
Speakers express concerns, request more information
Eleven residents spoke during public input. Taylor Gilfillan, former Director of Data Analytics, Evaluation, and Accountability for the school district, and Newberry Mayor Jordan Marlowe were among those who spoke.
Gilfillan expressed similar concerns to Rockwell about the lack of information supplied to the public before the public input sessions. He also proposed creating “sole factor” maps in which rezoning lines are broken down based on a single component and then compared to others, such as a map based entirely on distance or socioeconomic status. He said the goal of these maps would be to help rule out specific maps that wouldn’t work.
Marlowe referenced the close-knit city of Newberry and said that his top priority is keeping his community together: “We stick together – we pick each other up when we fall down, we lift each other up when we celebrate; and so our guiding principle is that if you live in the city of Newberry, you should be able to go to Newberry schools.”
All three Newberry schools are at or over capacity, with Newberry Elementary having the highest capacity in the county, at 141 percent. He said the community is willing to “suffer, sacrifice, and compromise” to remain together. He also mentioned his need for more information on the data before he could either support or criticize the rezoned maps.
Other speakers addressed the mental health of students who may be moved to a different school, traffic and bus routing concerns, and behavioral issues.
One caller, who stated her name as Rochelle, called on the board to focus solely on education, discipline, and transportation; she theorized that bus drivers don’t want to work because of bad behavior.
“When you say that teachers don’t want to go to low-economic schools, it’s not the financial or economic level; it’s the attitude, the discipline, and the behavior,” she said. She advised the board to stop allowing students to “play the victim” and start holding them accountable instead, and in turn, the problems would fix themselves.
Future Community Input Sessions
August 22, 5:30 p.m. – Hawthorne MS/HS Auditorium
August 24, 5:30 p.m. – Howard Bishop MS Cafeteria
August 28, 5:30 p.m. – Santa Fe HS Auditorium
August 29, 5:30 p.m. – Kanapaha MS Cafeteria
October 5, 5:30 p.m. – Newberry HS Auditorium
October 10, 5:30 p.m. – Gainesville HS Auditorium
Future school board meetings where rezoning will be discussed and voted on
September 19, 6 p.m. – Regular board meeting (including first reading of proposed zones)
October 17, 4 p.m. – Public hearing on proposed zones
November 7, 6 p.m. – Regular board meeting (including second reading/vote on revised attendance zones)
The meeting can be viewed in its entirety here.
The slides presented by Edwards can be viewed here.
Diversity…. the downfall…
More Harris word salad. Nothing gets done because we are too worried about social flavor of the day and forget that kids getting a quality education in a safe environment, free of politic and social agendas is the only priority to be considered. Once again the focus should on educating our kids for the future and not how map lines making our kids pawns for a board’s little games.
What ever happened to going to the closest school to your house
I mean, wouldn’t that be more “green”? Climate change is only important if it pushes the agenda.
Kudos to Rochelle who called it like it is…”When you say that teachers don’t want to go to low-economic schools, it’s not the financial or economic level; it’s the attitude, the discipline, and the behavior,” she said.
If she runs for SBAC in the next election, she gets my vote. She’s the only one telling it like it is – despite what current members claim.
The hot mess that is this IQ challenged Alachua County School Board and its inept staff continues in full vigor.
I have to actually give Abbitt credit for actually acknowledging the obvious: “When we’re moving kids from Northeast Gainesville to Southwest or Northwest Gainesville, they are not doing any better in those schools than the kids that are in Northeast Gainesville,”.
It’s not the condition of the facilities, the teachers, the number of computers, or the amount of money spent per student. The problem is kids raised by lousy (usually single) parents, and the school districts unwillingness to apply strict discipline.
The lousy parenting is beyond the school board’s control (would require elimination of most of the welfare state and government divorce incentives designed to destroy families in order to produce more impoverished Democrat voters), but the application of discipline *is* within their control. Letting the worst percent of students drag down the rest of the class is absolutely shameful.
Neighborhood schools are best for students and parents, and proper discipline with appropriate consequences will allow the highest number of kids to succeed. As another commenter noted, local government endlessly preaches about global warming, yet here they are saying it’s no big deal to bus students all the way across the map just to boost their liberal diversity score.
The failure of LBJ’s Social Experiment chronicled again.
Dad, the problem is that parents now – no matter color or politics – side with their kid and blame the teachers and school. Of course you can’t enforce discipline in that atmosphere, and like Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”
https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/
Raise your children and spoil your grandchildren. Or the other way around. Your choice.
Pogo? Damn Jazz you are old and out of touch. What’s next, quoting Perry Mason?
The libs here are weak, spineless, and so scared of anything and everything. Who cares if some parents complain? Tell them “We don’t care. Academics is our priority.”
Why is it that none of the people responsible for re-zoning mention anything about property values? It is always about this “diversity” BS which is a synonym for making every school equally as chaotic and dumb as every other school to placate lunatic activist minorities who despise what they deem excessive “whiteness.” What if all this BS about diversity is really all about the sick Obama agenda of busting up affluent white neighborhoods served by high quality local neighborhood schools by forced busing of low mental energy feral dim bulbs into better quality “white” schools while the comparatively bright and better disciplined “white” kids are forced into more distant low quality schools. Try explaining all this to a prospective buyer of your house when they find out that your schools are half way across town in a high crime war zone populated by knuckle-dragging gang bangers. There go your property values! By why should the government employed tax mooches in charge of “diversity” give a hoot about your property values?
I went to school in Gainesville from 1969-74 when “desegregation ” began and went to six different schools as they “integrated ” politics heavily into EDUCATION.
I attended public schools at the beginning of integration in Fla., and do not recall the level of negativity as we see now. It takes awhile for the pot of slowing boiling water to make you notice.
I went to Suwannee county Fl schools from 1962 to 1974 kids of all colors respected the teachers if not got your ass whip at school then got one when you got home kids worked after school and weekends their was no government hand outs you had to help feed your family
“Lack of diversity”, AKA forced busing, forced integration. It is not the job of the school board to determine the neighborhood the parents live in, but it is their job to zone schools for the local neighborhood. Busing has never worked and Alachua county school numbers consistently show that very fact. If certain schools don’t meet the districts standards, it is the job of the school board to focus on correcting that problem, not to shuffle children all over the county.
I was bussed to lily white schools in Dade County from 1954 to 1963. Funny, but no one complained except the kids.
I got bussed too, in the mid-60s. But it was mainly due to overcrowding. Everybody complained regardless of the reason.
One group that seems to get no thought from the board is the parents who have to deal with their kids being bussed to sites across town.
If a parent doesn’t have a car, dealing day to day with a school that might be two or three city bus connections away is a monumental hardship.
Was any data presented that would indicate whether or not the first proposed maps would increase or decrease busing? It seems that they have recognized that busing is an issue (primarily due to expense and lack of drivers), but it’s not clear to me whether this first proposal would increase or decrease busing.
I can only speak for my family and neighbors, but it will increase our need for transportation that we don’t currently use because they are proposing to send our kids over 30 mins one way to Alachua from our homes in Newberry. We will not be able to drive to Alachua and back like we are able to do in our neighborhood school. Their unreliable buses will have to do it and SBAC will have to increase their costs in gas. Who knows if our kids will ever make it to school at the rate transportation is going. Re-zoning is putting the cart before the horse on the issues in this school district.
There is no influencer of greater motivation to choose charter schools than Chief of Equity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement Anntwanique Edwards.
Call it what it is; BUSING, a failed concept from the 1970’s.
The headline is deceptive.
“..(Chief of Equity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement Anntwanique)Edwards began by addressing the district’s transportation challenges and how those ongoing challenges influenced the redrawing of the maps. She said the cost of gas, travel safety for children, and current bus routes were all considered. Given the district’s bus driver shortage, travel efficiency was a top priority. She also prioritized two-mile walk zones so that students who walk to school would not be rezoned, putting further strain on bus routes.
Edwards told the board that certain students would be exempt from the rezoning process: those who are going into fifth, eighth, and twelfth grades for the 2024-25 school year would be “grandfathered” in and excluded from changing schools, along with any student enrolled in a magnet program. …”
Certain members brought up concerns about diversity, but they also brought up concerns about overcrowding, travel time, etc.
This stuff is not easy, even though most of the commenters here would no doubt solve it in a heartbeat and with their usual call to arms –
“Get off my yard!!”
The county had an opportunity to increase economic opportunities and housing a couple of years ago with the proposed Plum Creek development but they chose not to. It may have introduced the possibility of new education facilities. Whether you or anyone else wants to admit it, the elected officials who are now trying to play “catch up” & cram “equity” down most people’s throats were not only the harbingers of explosive growth to the western part of the county, they were also instrumental in the restrictions of growth on the eastern side.
In echoing the concerns of some regarding the bussing issues, maybe you could assist with the shortage of bus drivers. Busing students from old Terwilliger to the new Terwilliger was certain to be a failure.
It’s hilarious the individuals who have no idea of the happenings of this school district, they’ve never attended or never had children enrolled and have little to no knowledge of the personnel who are inserted into the system because of reasons not necessarily in the best interests of the children, let alone the “qualifications” those personnel possess or at least claim to possess. What’s that thing you mention quite often about “people not having any experience.”
Maybe you should stay in your lane.
Your “Get off my yard!!” comment is justified, but here is how to interpret that:
We don’t want you in our community if you are not going to join the culture of our community. That’s standard for any community: We don’t want you in our golf club if you’re going to play loud music on the golf course. We don’t want you as a professor in our university unless you sign a DEI statement. We don’t want you in our Christian Bible reading group if you are going to dress up in drag. We don’t want you in our gang unless you prove that you have toxic masculinity. We don’t want you in upper management unless you pretend that our product is the best product of its kind on the market.
Regarding the education system:
One child can influence many other children to be disruptive; can distract many other children; can torment many other children. Just a few disrupters can influence many others to believe that education has no value; can influence many others that studying is not cool; can torment teachers, administrators, bus drivers and influence others to do the same to such an extent that the adults don’t even want to be a part of the system any longer.
I am an educator (not in the Alachua County system). I’ve had conversations with Jamaicans and Asians (as examples). They have told me there is no way children in the schools in those countries would stay in the schools if they were continual disrupters. In most cases they would stay in the system because after an expulsion and the punishment and shame from the family and community they would stop being disruptive.
The education-oriented parents have the mindset that “if I find out that you have been reprimanded by a teacher, you’ll get it twice as hard at home,” not as it is in some places in USA, “If I find out that the teacher has been picking on you, I’ll make the teacher think twice about doing that again.”
Maybe it is not the only solution, but it would help quite a lot — weed out the disrupters. This disruption is now systemic in certain school systems. There needs to be zero (or near zero) tolerance for disrupters.
That begs the question, where do we put the disruptors (my son just watched Escape From New York)?
The key is to get the disrupters out of the school system. They are obstructing those that want to get educated and influencing others to not care about education and obstructing teachers from teaching.
There could be a “probation” which is basically a last chance to stay in the school system.
“Out of the school system” means not in the same place as those that want to be educated. They don’t ride on the same bus, they don’t go to the same school building. Where do the disrupters go? Vocational training including art and music? Work with pay? Juvenile detention?
The focus of the educational system needs to be on the students that want to get educated, not the disrupters.
“School board’s first look at rezoning maps focuses on diversity”
Well….of course it does. Did anyone expect anything else from these race obsessed leftists?
“School Board focuses on diversity” well here’s a news flash, the school board should be focusing on EDUCATION.
Good article with lots of good comments.
It’s obvious that the school board’s approach to rezoning is more about liberals breaking up the neighborhoods and, shall I dare to say, dismantling the advancement of white people (mostly conservatives). It’s all political! Most conservatives (black and white alike) discipline their children. The left, for the most part, do not. Also, the lack of discipline in schools is the reason we can’t fill the jobs of bus drivers and teachers. Maybe the school board should listen more to teachers and bus drivers for solutions instead of their covert political views. If teachers were allowed to speak freely, I’m sure their insights would shock the community and destroy the left’s political agenda.
Speaking from personal experience here. Getting bused to the worst middle school in Pinellas county back in the early 70’s caused me to loose all interest in education just so the school board could hit it’s numbers. My closet middle school was within easy biking range and I would have enjoyed the exercise instead of riding a bus for forty minutes one way.
Having to fight your way through the day while trying to learn wasn’t an easy task for a kid. All it taught me was there is another segment of civilization I wanted no part of. It also taught me about true racism. I learned that from bussing!
What kind of “diversity,” ethnic, pronouns, or IQs?
A: whatever gets them more woke grants.
It’s funny how they are paying this diversity expert hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not even following her advice because “they know bettur.”
Sorry Mr. Peabody, I fail to recognize the “expert” you’re referring to. If the reference is to Ms. Edwards, she is far from an “expert” with regard to the title she has been given and her financial compensation is far from “hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.”
She has been an Assistant Principal at multiple schools if that’s any indication of her qualifications.
Why is Kay Abbots first concern about diversity? Why isn’t her first concern about improving the schools within the school zones? You can’t artificially improve a school by moving the kids around. It takes an improved infrastructure of teachers, staff and policies
So much emphasis on diversity when it should be on academics, busing shortage, and discipline in schools etc. Why do they think the schools in the southwest aren’t diversified enough? Have they even stepped foot at Buchholz, Wiles, or Kanapaha? Plenty of all kinds of people attending these schools! Rockwell is a joke!! The woman’s kids don’t even attend Alachua County Public Schools! Yet, she wants to scramble everything up and mess with our kids just so she can feel good about herself and what she’s doing for a certain community! This rezoning is not going to solve one thing. It is going to backfire so bad and I hope the voters take note and send these “certain” board members packing.
Regarding this comment: “When we’re moving kids from Northeast Gainesville to Southwest or Northwest Gainesville, they are not doing any better in those schools than the kids that are in Northeast Gainesville,” Abbitt said. That’s a statement that should trigger a completely different approach to educational gains for all kids.
And, by the way, the 2-mile zone is a joke. Just as there are not hoards of people riding the busses or using the bike paths, there are not dozens of children walking anything like 2 miles in these times.
So maybe, just maybe, teach kids where they live, meet the culture head on, and stop talking lollipops and gumdrops.
As a highly-effective retired teacher, I can assert that direct instruction and needs-grouping work for all students, the gifted, the typical, the special needs. The planned emotional, physical and cognitive chaos sponsored by the board does not.