Lillian Wilborne struggles to see who benefits from Williamsburg-James City County Schools’ proposed redistricting.
She’s a Grove resident and mother of two mixed-race students at James River Elementary. The percentage of students of color at the school under the new attendance zones would increase from 54% to 60%.
The number of economically disadvantaged students would also go up, and she feels the division is heading in the wrong direction.
About two dozen spoke against WJCC’s proposed redistricting maps at Tuesday’s school board meeting, including parent David Rudd Ross.
“This map harms the diversity of our school building populations,” he said. “If we think of diversity as how closely does this school’s diversity match its peer schools in the division, nearly every building gets worse.”
WJCC is adjusting school zones for the next year when it opens two new preschool centers. School leaders say redistricting will ease overcrowding in some schools and make bus routes more efficient. Superintendent Daniel Keever said keeping the schools economically and racially diverse is important too, and the division will shift more teachers, staff and money as needed.
Some parents, however, fear that concentrating lower-income families in schools such as Matthew Whaley Elementary will widen student achievement gaps and that the robust PTA will be diminished when the more affluent Kingspoint neighborhood is shifted to another school. Some neighbors near Stonehouse Elementary questioned the proposed move of the Wellington neighborhood out of its attendance zone.
Other parents are concerned about MGT Impact Solutions, the consultant handling the redistricting plans. The firm has been at the center of controversies in other areas, including a $1.5 million settlement with a Colorado school district after accusations of fund mismanagement.
Several speakers want more detailed information on the data used to build the plan and specifics on how resources will be allocated before the maps are approved.
“How is the disability profile of each school being considered for students with disabilities? The plan must include much more than simply having a special education teacher on the building roster,” said Jamila Walker. “That distinction does matter.”
Opposition, however, hasn’t been universal. A majority of WJCC families who responded to surveys in August believed the proposal balanced multiple priorities in a reasonable way; less than half of respondents from the broader community, though, felt the same. The data didn’t break down responses by racial or socioeconomic demographics.
The York-James City-Williamsburg NAACP Chapter President, Charles Gates, said he’s monitoring the process and could change his mind on it depending on what is approved and how the transition is handled.
But up to this point, “it is about as fair as it can be.”
“There’s going to be some areas that could have been done differently,” Gates said, but thinks “that they’re making a push towards the right direction at this point.”
WJCC is a member of HRETA, which owns WHRO’s broadcast license.
