The Howard County Board of Education made elementary- school boundary line changes official last night, adopting the recommended plan put before members in October with the changes suggested Tuesday by School Superintendent John R. O'Rourke and his staff.
Middle school pupils will learn their fates Nov. 26.
"All of the decisions made [were] in the best interests of the children," said Jane. B. Schuchardt, the board chairman. "It's been a very, very difficult [process]."
Motion by motion, board members reviewed suggested boundary line changes - which all together move more than 1,000 of the nearly 20,000 pupils to different schools - and voted to keep or kill them.
Changes in the recommended plan that were proposed by the superintendent were approved by the board.
They included not redistricting anyone attending Laurel Woods or Forest Ridge elementaries; and leaving the 13 Banneker Road children in Bryant Woods Elementary instead of moving them to Running Brook Elementary.
The toughest decision made by the board was accepting the superintendent's recommended changes at Talbott Springs and Stevens Forest elementaries. The board ratified the alterations with a vote of 3 to 2. (Members Virginia W. Charles and James P. O'Donnell were opposed to the motion.)
The decision will send 91 children living in apartments and townhouses north of Kilimanjaro Road from Talbott Springs to Stevens Forest, along with pupils living on one of four cul-de-sacs off Kilimanjaro. The only change to the superintendent's recommendations came here: Grand Point apartments will remain at Talbott Springs.
O'Rourke suggested the changes to balance the percentages of low-income students and high and low test scores at Stevens Forest and Talbott Springs. That left some parents from Stevens Forest. where scores had been higher. unhappy.
"What do we get? What do we win out of this?" asked Regina Coleman, a Stevens Forest parent, whose children's school will have more low-income pupils and lower average test scores so that Talbott Springs will be in a better situation. "We're a smaller school; we don't have the resources [to help those children]. We get nothing."
The board also voted to leave children who are open-enrolled at Stevens Forest in grades one through four at that school until their graduation to middle school. Open-enrolled kindergartners will have to return to their home districts beginning next school year.
Left to fade into obscurity was an alternate plan that would have moved more pupils and was introduced solely because it did the seeming impossible: assign Hopewell children to a neighborhood school instead of busing them to relatively distant Talbott Springs. That plan had too many faults to go forward, board members said.
Instead, the board settled on a plan that leaves Hopewell as an island and creates another island with no home school out of the Sewells Orchard and Orchard Hill neighborhoods. Pupils from there will be transferred from Jeffers Hill to Talbott Springs Elementary. The shift will turn some walkers into bus riders.
The county's rampant development and new school openings cause the near-annual redistricting. Every year, about 1,000 new pupils (the equivalent of two elementary schools) enter the county's crowded schools, and trying to make room for them results in a Domino shuffle of children from one school to another.
It is a method that leaves everyone unsatisfied - especially parents, who claim the moves subject their children to lesser education, feed them into middle and high schools where they do not know anyone, corrupt community cohesion and are generally a pain.
But they can take heart in this: Residents can appeal. After last year's high school redistricting, three people challenged the plan, and it was put before the Maryland State Board of Education, which - this is the part where parents lose heart - upheld the new map.