Proposed Southwest School Boundaries Spark Concerns

AISD's new Southwest middle school will draw students from both Small and Bailey. At issue are students from Mills Elementary, who could be split by the new attendance-zone boundaries.

The Austin Independent School District's new Southwest middle school is on track to open next year. It has a principal – former Bowie High assistant principal Vickie Gaudin Bauerle – and AISD's board of trustees plans to announce the campus name on Dec. 8. But the big question of which children will go there is causing tensions between neighborhoods.

In May, the district formulated the Facility Use and Boundary Task Force, a volunteer committee intended to draw up the new school's attendance-zone boundaries. On Oct. 7, the task force presented a draft plan, which carved sections out of the current boundaries for Small and Bailey middle schools, taking Clayton, Kiker, and about 75% of Mills elementaries within its borders. Bailey, in turn, would take on small tracts from Covington and Paredes to bolster its enrollment numbers. This would leave Bailey and Small (each with about 1,100 capacity) and the new middle school (proposed for 1,150 students) at around 70% of capacity, relieving overcrowding, providing space for growth, and still keeping each school big enough to provide the all-important electives. According to Joe Silva, AISD's assistant director of planning services, the draft boundary map is a starting point to discuss "what's best for all the middle schools in the area, not just the new one."

But even with the public process, debate has flared up around the new boundaries. "All three schools – Kiker, Mills, and Clayton – would like to flow in whole," said Silva, "but that's just not possible, because [the new middle school] would be at capacity on the day it opened." The current proposal slices a 27-street chunk of the Mills attendance zone out of the new middle school zone. This means when students from these neighborhood blocks leave fifth grade, they'll head to Small while most of their classmates will go to the new middle school.

According to Frank Simonetti, who serves as the task force's geographic member for Mills Elementary, that's difficult for local families to accept. He explained: "Every school has its own culture, but at Mills we're a really tight community, and we've had to work really hard to get our school exemplary. Everyone has stepped up, and that's brought the school closer together."

Mills PTA secretary Judy Bienvenu has a fourth-grader and a first-grader in Mills. The students are also members of the local scout and guide troops, and she says these types of community-based activities point to what the district is missing. The Mills community is defined by the Mills attendance zone, she said, "and everything we do, we've aligned with our new community." Splitting a small neighborhood like Mills – especially one within walking distance of the new middle school – doesn't make sense to her. She also doesn't understand the blow that would come from separating the kids to bolster Small's numbers. "There's no way that 15 fifth-graders can uphold the standards that Small achieves," she said, adding that Mills families aren't wedded to going to either the new middle or Small. "Our goal is to stay together as a community."

Simonetti hopes further discussion will resolve the kinks and that all three elementaries can remain whole when they move up to middle school. The proposed boundaries were drawn up using last year's student population projections, and new numbers, due on Dec. 11, could shift. A slowing economy may slow development, meaning the district could drop its five-year enrollment projections. Plus, he noted, the neighboring middle schools are still high quality. "My personal belief is that if we look at the best thing for the kids as a whole, the kids from Travis Country [subdivision] should go to Small," he added.

Both Bienvenu and Simonetti believe the process exposed underlying fears in the Mills community that the families' voices are drowned out by the nearby Circle C and Travis Country developments, as they were in the site selection of a Southwest Austin H-E-B and in the repurposing of Porter Middle as the Ann Rich­ards School for Young Women Leaders (see "Who Killed Porter Middle School?" March 10, 2006). Had Porter been left open, there wouldn't be a need to build a new Southwest middle school so quickly, which critics say encourages more sprawl. Bienvenu is frustrated that the district places so much emphasis on planned developments, not current students. "From our viewpoint," she said, "we can't see why you wouldn't give priority to a community that already exists."

Silva calls the map a work-in-progress. "Proposition 1 is a compilation of the proposals that came in, and even that is a work-in-progress," Silva said, referring to last week's voter approval of a property-tax increase for education funding. He also expects that the trustees – who will make the final decision in January after additional task force consultations and public hearings – will take parents' concerns to heart. "It's easy to get lost in saying, 'It's just five students here and 50 students there,' but the task force always remembers they're talking about somebody's family."