LITTLE ROCK — The Pulaski County Special School District is recommending school board election zones that would cluster schools in the same zone based on “feeder” patterns and account for rapid population growth in some parts of the district.
The district unveiled a proposed map Monday at one of three planned public hearings.
Under a map favored by Superintendent Jerry Guess — chosen from five alternatives — most students who go to an elementary school in one election zone would eventually go to a middle and high school in that same zone.
That fixes a problem with the current school board zones, which split Maumelle and Robinson schools into different zones.
“I think this is a logical presentation,” Guess said at a public meeting Monday.
The proposal would not change current attendance patterns. It would put each of the district’s six high schools and all of the schools that feed into that high school in their own election zone. One election zone would not have any schools in it.
The district, classified in fiscal distress, is currently under state control and operating without a school board. Election zones that are eventually approved will be used when the district regains local control.
The district is obligated by state law to equalize the populations in its election zones after each U.S. census, the most recent of which was done in 2010.
U.S. Census data shows populations within the district’s current seven election zones have shifted so that the most populous zone, which includes Maumelle, has 34,361 residents, and the least populous zone, which covers the southeast portion of the district, has 9,927 residents, according to a Metroplan analysis Guess presented at the meeting.
Guess consulted Metroplan, a regional planning group, to redraw those boundaries with the aim of clustering feeder schools, following logical geographic boundaries such as landmarks and major roads, and equalizing population, he said.
Districts typically strive to redraw zones so that population totals are within 5 percent of the average, Metroplan planner Jeff Runder said.
“Once you redo one zone, you pretty much end up redoing all seven of them,” he said.
In the administrators’ preferred map, all zones have between 21,082 and 22,789 residents.
Guess and district administrators also sought to “increase the likelihood of minority representation” on the board by designing zones that included larger concentrations of black voters in certain zones to make them more influential in elections there, he said.
In the preferred map, called Alternative 4a, Zone 7 is 37.5 percent black and the adjacent Zone 1 is 33.9 percent black. All other zones have smaller concentrations of black residents in that map.
Because the fiscally distressed district is under state control and operating without a school board, Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell will make the final decision on which map will be implemented, Guess said.
Administrators will hold two more meetings to seek public input on the proposed zone revisions. Those meetings will be Thursday at 6 p.m. at Maumelle High School and May 29 at 6 p.m. at Jacksonville High School.
More information about the proposed rezoning will be available this week on the district’s website, pcssd.org.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 05/22/2012