Three potential student-assignment plans for Boston students were announced earlier today. The district is considering a “10 Zone Proposal” that would divide the city into 10 sending zones for primary schools and two “Home-Based” plans that provide students with either six (Plan A) or nine (Plan B) options based on his or her address. You can read the proposed student-assignment plans on the district’s website.
The plans will be heard tomorrow by a mayor-appointed external advisory committee tasked with providing feedback to the district on its student-assignment plans. There will be a community meeting on the proposals in early February.
On bostonschoolchoice.org, the district’s website details the process it’s been using to navigate this fraught process: “BPS hosted more than a dozen community meetings and heard from 1,850 people since the first models were released in September.” I wrote a bit about those hearings earlier this year.
The Boston Globe quotes a letter from superintendent Carol R. Johnson to the district’s staff:
“All three models represent an improvement over the current system. They better distribute the overall chances of a child attending a higher-quality school regardless of address; they are more predictable than the three-zone system, empowering families to get to know their school choices well in advance; they significantly decrease the average distance students would travel to school; and they would continue to support the diverse school communities we believe benefit student learning.”
I spoke with superintendent Johnson about the student-assignment plans in an interview last fall.