Clovis school board gets it right with boundary changes for new campuses | Opinion

Since arriving in Clovis in 2013, the area where I live has gone from being referred to as the “country” to having so many new housing and commercial developments that they’re a stone’s throw away in every direction. My part of town is not alone.

Clovis is growing, nearly 25% between 2012 and 2022, and while the Clovis Unified School District hasn’t grown at the same rate (roughly 7% in that same decade) there’s still an uptick of about 3,000 students, or roughly 20% more than the student population of CUSD’s “newest” high school, Clovis North, when it was built back in 2007.

That is why the Terry P. Bradley Educational Center, complete with the new Clovis South High School, is opening this fall. The center will also feature a new middle school and elementary school, adding to the six other elementary schools opened in the last decade throughout the district.

With the high school comes a new set of attendance boundaries, a process two years in the making. Sure, there’s always a little drama when the board makes a decision, right up to and including when a board member offers a radically different attendance map when there are already five options out there, but these are the decisions trustees are elected to make.

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It won’t make them more popular, but I’m glad to see that the new map does what it’s supposed to do: Balance student population and resources, while ensuring equity racially and economically.

According to the board, the district received more than 700 comments about the redistricting, and nearly all of them were negative. There’s no way to know exactly, but I’d suspect most of the comments were from parents with children who will need to change schools.

That is not to diminish the anxiety and stress associated with having to make such a change, but when new schools are built to accommodate growth, inevitably current students are moved into those schools from pre-existing locations. The board made tough choices, even ones that affected their own children.

The board and district administrators recognized there were situations that could cause hardships in moving, and they’re planning for it. They have put in place a phase-in program for the new schools, giving parents and students as much advanced notice as possible, and an application process for families who have multiple students in a school or school cluster to ensure that siblings stay together. Will it satisfy everyone? Of course not, but it does identify and remedy obvious drawbacks, and the board should be commended for putting a plan in place ahead of time.

I’m sure being on the school board isn’t easy, and there probably aren’t many decisions tougher than the ones that result in the need for students to be moved to different schools due to changing attendance boundaries. There was community discussion, a variety of maps proposed, expert help requested and listened to, and most importantly a transparent plan created to minimize the challenges inherent with resetting the attendance boundaries.

If you’ve read some of my previous articles, you know I’m not shy about voicing my distaste at board decisions I don’t agree with, so its only fair that I acknowledge when they get it right.

Noha Elbaz of Clovis is a college administrator. Email: noha.elbaz1@gmail.com.