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What Boston's new school-assignment zones would look like

Proposed school zones

This shows School Superintendent Carol Johnson's proposal for increasing the number of school-assignment zones for elementary and middle schools in Boston from three to five (click on it for a larger version). The goal is to save money by reducing the length of some bus routes.

I'm betting the outcome will be to increase confusion among parents. Parents in Hyde Park, who'd been studying schools in Mattapan and Dorchester, will now have to bone up on schools in West Roxbury and Roslindale. Are North End parents prepared to have their kids bused to Jamaica Plain?

Via Braving the BPS Lottery, a Roslindale mother who's already wondering what this will mean for her 2010 plans.

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Comments

Selfishly, as a resident of Hyde Park with a young child, I am ecstatic about this possibility. In doing research, I was hoping to somehow be able to send my son to the Kilmer or the Lyndon when the time comes.

I'll be watching this with a great deal of interest.

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Who are the losers who live in that Red area where there aren't any public schools, at all?

Hey, wait a minute ...

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Not sure what boundaries they used on this map, but as drawn it looks like the northern edge of the green zone includes a small southern piece of JP -- including Forest Hills and Bourne neighborhoods. The dot marked "BTU/K-8" is the building on Walk Hill/Wachussett currently occupied by Young Achievers, which is moving.

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The School Committee voted this year to make that a K-8 school specifically for Roslindale (well, to give Roslindale kids priority, at any rate), because there aren't any Roslindale school buildings that could easily be converted into K-8, and Roslindale parents were really demanding K-8 schools (gosh, I wonder why?).

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That may be -- without the BTU school the boundaries might have mapped cleanly onto neighborhood boundaries -- but that school is sited in JP and the zone as drawn is splitting JP into two. I don't know enough to know if I care, just noticing it on the map.

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Some of the other neighborhoods are also split up, notably Mattapan and Roxbury. Also, that part of Jamaica Plain is considered to be Roslindale by the city for planning purposes; it actually follows the BRA planning district line.

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Anon, Can you point me to where the BRA planning district definitions live that you think show the Forest Hills neighborhood (I'm speaking specifically to the section east of Hyde Park Ave, South of the Casey/Morton St) and Bourne neighborhoods as part of a Roslindale planning district? I haven't seen them before. I have seen the BRA maps that show it as part of JP, planning district 9C, e.g., here:

http://www.bostonredevelopmentauthority.org/pdf/Zo...

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There's this.

But I wasn't saying that part of Forest Hills is part of Roslindale, or that the BRA is somehow involved. I was saying that the School Committee, in trying to do something about the lack of K-8 programs in Roslindale, designated a school in JP as being set aside primarily for Roslindale students (to be run by the Boston Teachers Union). At the time they took that vote, it didn't make all that much difference, since JP and Roslindale were in the same assignment zone (the borders of which, in any case, are set by Court Street, not the BRA). But now, obviously, it's an issue.

Why Roslindale parents want a K-8 option.

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Try the BRA map website, called the Boston Atlas. Use the "Planning Districts" overlay. That'll show the planning zones of which I think.

Based on the map you point to, it looks like BRA updated the zones in mid-2008. But they were the other way (with the Bourne area in Roslindale) for a while. It makes sense to follow that for school assignment because it's more geographically compact.

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