Iowa City revisits school shifts, this time for junior high

Less than a year after a contentious redistricting debate, the Iowa City school district is back at it.

Kind of.

The school board tonight will discuss, and may decide, where students from Lincoln and Hills elementary schools attend junior high. While it's not a boundary issue, this is a result of redistricting.

Last spring, the district studied school boundaries to resolve, among other things, the enrollment disparity between overcrowded West High School and undercapacity City High School.

The main change that came of that was to switch Lincoln and Hills from the West High feeder system to City High. Those students were to attend Northwest Junior High in Coralville, as they had been, but starting next school year, they would attend City High instead of West.

Some parents objected to their kids being split from friends after eighth-grade and requested they attend South East Junior High in Iowa City. Ultimately, those students will still end up at City High.

The current debate has led some people to question whether the district is backpedaling.

School board members reject that argument.

“I think we've been pretty clear that ... redistricting was not a one-time decision,” board President Patti Fields said.

Board members said last year they would review boundaries and enrollment issues regularly. Last year was the first time in two decades the district took a comprehensive look at boundaries. Such a long passage of time, school officials said, made the process more difficult and contributed to passionate disagreements among residents who packed several meetings.

The focus last year was on the elementary schools and high schools, and several board members now say that not enough attention was paid to junior high schools.

Board member Toni Cilek said rather than deciding only where Lincoln and Hills students should go, she'd like the board to look at junior high schools as a whole. That would be a sort of mini-redistricting.

She's not sure if that can happen quickly enough to get the Lincoln and Hills issue settled before next school year.

After listening to parents, Superintendent Stephen Murley is recommending Hills students be switched to South East Junior High. He did not make a recommendation on Lincoln because that community was split on the issue.

The Lincoln and Hills students would add about 100 seventh- and eighth-graders to South East, which has the room, Murley said.

South East has about 675 students this year and a capacity of 800, meaning 100 extra students would be pushing its limits. Just adding Hills would send 30 more students to South East.

Moving students would put Northwest, which currently has about 640 students, well below its 800-student capacity. The other junior high school, North Central in North Liberty, has 400 students and room for 450.

Board member Tuyet Dorau said she will vote against sending the students to South East. She noted that capacity concerns were a major reason redistricting was undertaken, and she said rerouting the Lincoln and Hills students to South East would cause further problems and be a step backward.

“Logic would dictate that you don't introduce that same issue into another layer of your organization,” she said.

Fields said that because of capacity concerns and the lack of consensus from Lincoln parents, she'd support sending Hills students to South East and keeping Lincoln students at Northwest.

No matter what, the students will end up at City High.

“The point that I've stood on is that this does not affect the destination, the destination being that we are working to alleviate the overcrowding at West and the undercapacity issues at City High,” Murley said.

It also would not be a total capitulation to the Hills community, which strongly opposed being moved from West High. Parents have accepted the change, Hills Mayor Russ Bailey said, but they don't want their kids to be split from junior high friends.

“This way, by going to South East, at least they're going to stay in the same path,” he said.

The issue is complicated by there being three junior high schools and two comprehensive high schools. Realistically, the feeder system has to be split, otherwise the high school enrollment disparity would worsen with two schools sending students to West High and one to City High.