Boyertown gears up for elementary redistricting
BOYERTOWN >> As it gears up for a possible elementary school redistricting, the Boyertown Area School District has already announced some changes for the school year that starts in September.
In a letter to the community posted on the district’s website, Superintendent Dana Bedden announced that the district will allow students attending a school outside its attendance area to continue to attend for one more year, but parents will have to re-apply and provide their own transportation.
“Please be advised that there will be no grandfathering for an incoming sibling of a currently
deviated student beyond specific reasons associated with educational plans. If the parent/guardian wishes to change a current deviation for the 2019-2020 school year, the incoming (sibling) student will not be permitted to deviate as well,” Bedden added.
Boyertown has been dancing around redistricting since a 2012 feasibility study outlined the challenges faced by the district’s elementary population and a shift in the majority of the district’s population from the Berks County side to the Montgomery County side of the district. Earlier studies marked the same trend.
Driven by a development boom in the last 15 years, about 60 percent of the student population now lives in Montgomery County, but only two of the district’s seven elementary schools — Gilbertsville and New Hanover/Upper Frederick — are located in Montgomery County.
It was the feasibility study that drove the decisions to move the sixth grades into the two middle schools, and the eighth grades to the high school, as well as the renovation and expansion of the high school and middle school east.
Those projects now completed, the district is turning its attention to what Bedden called “rightsizing our facility usage” in order to “more effectively, efficiently and equitably enroll and assign students to our schools.”
In addition school assignment “deviation requests,” there will also be less flexibility regarding what the district calls “gray areas” in terms of attendance in the 2019-2020 school year, according to Bedden’s post.
Begun in 2010 as the development boom in Montgomery County began, the “gray areas” were a way to be flexible about which school students would attend with an eye toward maintaining similar class sizes throughout the district.
“In the 2019-2020 school year, student registration staff will no longer utilize the ‘gray area’ zones, and any student currently registered based upon the ‘gray area’ will be anchored/ assigned to a home school based on where they reside within the school attendance boundaries,” Bedden wrote.
However, “any student that has already been assigned/anchored to a gray area home school will not be reevaluated and moved for the 2019-2020 school year.”
Further, if a family has a student in a “gray area home school” with a younger sibling coming along, “the Boyertown Area School District will keep families together if the student will not be moving up to the secondary levels,” according to information in Bedden’s post.
Any attendance changes that result from a demographic study now being finalized, and which will be unveiled at a meeting on Feb. 19 at Boyertown Area Senior High School, will not take affect until the 2020-2021 school year, Bedden wrote.
“It is essential for our parents, students, and community to understand that this process will occur over the next two school years and changes in school assignment will be necessary for some of our students,” wrote Bedden. “As changes occur, sometimes tough decisions will be made for us to accomplish our goal of offering a quality education equitably.”