Toward the end of Thursday’s BOE meeting Greenwich Schools Superintendent Dr. Toni Jones updated the board on the open enrollment survey for interest in Central Middle School.
The building is under construction adjacent to the existing 50’s era building and is set to be complete in time for the new school year in the fall.
She said that as of Thursday there were 14 rising 6th grade students interested in switching to Central, but they were all 5th graders at Western Middle School.
“We actually thought it was at 17 but one of the things we had to go back and do was to cross reference and look up every student for their address. There was one family that was in a building where their home zone was already Central, but they were in a magnet school. So we have to check everybody’s forms.”
Jones said in addition to the 14 students going into 6th grade, there were three students going into 7th grade and four students going into 8th grade who were interested in moving to CMS.
Jones said she was trying to gather data on how the process would impact one school over the other.
“Almost all of them are coming from Western,” she said.
“Are we going to need to shift resources? Not shift resources? How many of these students could have unique needs? What I mean by that is it could be EL services, special education, 504. Maybe they’re an ALP student. How is it going to impact when you look at, is it a level 1 student who needs a lot of support? Or primarily level 4’s who are on the higher side? I’m digging in so we have all of that information.”
She noted the enrollment survey had closed earlier in the day of Thursdays’s meeting at 12:00 noon.
“That will be a decision the board will have to make going forward because we want to be very thoughtful before you just keep taking students – that we are not impacting another building in another way,” Jones said.
Jones said she was not asking the board to make a decision on Thursday.
She said the open enrollment could continue to remain available, and the board could decide to only take some of the students depending on the order their survey form was received.
“If you decided we’re going to take 15, or 20, it would be like when you do a lottery, first in, first served. These (responses) were all in on time today by noon.”
Karen Kraus asked if the open enrollment respondents would be treated similar to early action or early decision in college applications and be required to attend CMS based on their survey.
Jones said no, that would not be the case.
“Whether it is a magnet school or open enrollment – if they are zoned and their house is for a particular school I don’t think we could come back in the fall if they change their mind and say, no, no, you committed to a particular school – if they live in a certain zone.”
Karen Hirsh said, “We don’t want to solve one issue by unintentionally causing other issues we didn’t have before.”
Jones added it was difficult to generalize about the small number of children interested in switching schools.
“That’s why I’m doing the work, she said. “All the principals aren’t sitting around the table talking about this together. We’re looking at each child as they come in, so we can better understand how it will impact.”
In general she said, among the 14 interested students, there might, for example, be 6 special needs students. There might be 2.
“Does that impact the staffing we need in the building or not? That’s the kind of stuff I’m looking for,” she said.
Ms Hirsh said the unintended consequence she had in mind concerned racial balance.
“Since you mentioned they’re all coming from Western, I don’t want to bring up racial balance, but that was I was referring to – not something as granular as whether a student needed additional support,” Hirsh said.
Paul Cappiali recalled that at a previous meeting the idea of opening CMS enrollment exclusively to Eastern Middle School students came up, but there was a question about whether that would be legal. He asked Dr. Jones if she had consulted an attorney.
“I want to be sensitive about racial imbalance, but right now the practicality of it is we’re looking for bodies to move from Eastern to Central, but we may not be offering that exactly because we’re not sure if we’ve violating any laws by doing that,” Cappiali said.
Jones said she had not consulted an attorney because the survey went to Western and Eastern students.
“It was offered equally to Eastern and Western. It’s just that they don’t have the same level of interest,” she said, adding she would not recommend limiting opening enrollment to Eastern students.
“I get that. In the end, can we tell the Western kids no?” Cappiali asked.
Jones said if that was the wish of the board she could seek an attorney opinion, but she would not recommend that.
“We all want to be conscious about causing an imbalance in another school,” Cappiali said. “We want to be careful with the law.”
“When you talk about racial imbalance, we’re a very diverse community, but for racial balance, could it have an impact? Absolutely,” she said.
Jones said she had checked the data, and Western was close to “pending imbalance.”
“It doesn’t take that many students to change it,” she said.
“Right now the practicality of it is we’re looking for bodies to move EMS to CMS but we might not be offering that exactly because we’re not sure about violating any laws,” Cappiali said.
No decision was taken.
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