District One board to talk new attendance boundaries

Opening of Dorothy Hall Elementary prompts first realignment since ’07

Yuma Elementary School District One’s governing board will be considering potential new attendance boundaries for five schools when it meets this month, to accommodate the opening of one of them this fall.

District Superintendent Jamie Sheldahl said Friday this will be the first realignment of any of these lines since 2007, just before the real estate crash halted the rapid growth the district had been seeing.

It’s taken nine months for staff to get to this point, working with demographers, eyeing the pace of the area’s growth and balancing the interests of students and parents at each school.

“It’s not something you want to do every year,” Sheldahl said.

The proposed attendance area for the new Dorothy Hall Elementary School forms a long rectangle between 32nd Street on the north and County 14th Street on the south, Avenue 5E on the west and Araby Road to the east.

There are a little over 300 students living in that area now, and the campus capacity will be 600. But it’s not expected to be roomy for long.

“We anticipate that with the current building that’s going on and the number of students who currently live there, that school will be at capacity within two or three years,” he said.

The $12 million school, funded by a 2014 voter-approved bond issue, is being built near the southeast corner of Avenue 5 1/2 E and 44th Street. Drawing its map took a little bit of trial and error, Sheldahl said.

“Our first crack at kind of estimating the attendance boundaries for Dorothy Hall, we tested the boundaries a little bit bigger, and the school would have been at capacity by the time we opened the school. And with the amount of growth we’re seeing out there it wouldn’t have been a good thing,” he said.

Attendance boundaries for Palmcroft, Rolle, Desert Mesa and Otondo elementary schools are also being shifted on the proposed map.

Among the largest groups of students to be affected are the approximately 170 who live on Marine Corps Air Station Yuma or are connected to the military. These kids are now within Palmcroft’s boundary and will be moved to Rolle, which is closer to the base, Sheldahl said.

In these situations parents are to be given the option of enrolling their child at Palmcroft for one more year. Most of these families are on base for three years, so this could allow kids to finish out their time in Yuma at the same campus.

Extra consideration is being given there in part because those children may have already been through several relocations and/or parental deployments, he said. Kids just moving onto the base will be sent to Rolle starting next fall.

Meetings were held for parents at both schools last week, Sheldahl said, and the proposals seemed to be well-received. Most of the kids being moved out of Rolle will be going to Dorothy Hall, with a few others slated to go to Otondo or Desert Mesa, which are closer to their homes.

The latter two schools should come out with approximately the same number of students next year as they have this year. Both are larger-capacity campuses, but classroom sizes at all schools are determined by available teachers and not physical space.

All five proposed maps are posted on www.yuma. org/Our_Schools, on the right margin of the page. The District One school board will meet next on Dec. 10.

Attendance boundaries function as “transportation boundaries,” Sheldahl said, determining which school each child is able to walk or be bused to. Many parents do choose to take their kids to a different school, which makes it more difficult to predict what the actual enrollment will be, he said.

“We’ve been able to accommodate the vast majority of open-enrollment requests,” he said.

Under the new map, the district estimates it will save six to eight bus trips per day. “A lot of kids were being bused into Rolle,” he said.

The superintendent said there’s no guarantee that the new lines, if adopted by the school board, will be the last word on the issue.

“We don’t have a crystal ball. If things keep moving the way they have been moving, we might have to make some additional adjustments down the road. But you never know. Back in 2006-07 we thought we were going to be building schools left and right and then all of a sudden the recession hit.”