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Arlington Public Schools (APS) is currently in the process of revising School Board Policy B-2.1 Boundaries, which governs the process the school division uses when changing school attendance boundaries for existing schools and to determine the school attendance boundaries for new schools.
The goal of this policy is to provide specific reasons for initiating school boundary changes, which are a school building’s enrollment has been significantly over or under building design capacity for the past two years; capital expansion to relieve overcrowding is not feasible; a school facility is planned for construction or repurposing; or there are other advantages to making such a boundary change.
The revisions to the policy include the following items:
- Add more bases for changing boundaries (program location adjustments, new school sites or programs, and repurposing of schools).
- Clarify that changes are based on schools currently being over capacity, in addition to projections.
- Add repurposing of a school to the reasons for consideration of a boundary change.
- Change public hearing notice requirement from 10 days to seven days, to mirror the recent Code of Virginia change. Also add requirement that notice be included in a newspaper of general circulation as required by the Code of Virginia.
- Change boundary review from every five years to every two years.
- Add rationale for changing the boundaries to the proposal presented to the Board along with questions from the APS New Initiative Proposal Template and remove the community engagement plan from the proposal.
- Add language regarding notification of affected families and how boundary processes are to begin.
- Delete the out-of-date timeline currently in the policy.
- Add a procedure through which small adjustments can be made without a full process under limited circumstances, only when they will not affect any existing residents.
- Prioritize the considerations. Add more specifics on “stability” and “demographics”. Move “contiguity” to the PIP.
- Add definition of building design capacity and of planning units.
In addition, a Policy Implementation Procedure (PIP) will be created that details the process for establishing new school attendance boundaries, such as a defined timeline for the process, details on the community engagement process, and the criteria for alignment and demographics.
The policy and PIP are available for public comment until Friday, March 29, 2024, which is longer than the normal 30-day public comment period to ensure the community has an opportunity to review these items and provide feedback. The feedback received from the community will be used to revise the policy and PIP before the final version is presented to the School Board in May 2024.