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Nancy Fox tried to find a solution to the Board of Education's problem. She and friend Catherine Mackay followed the board's middle school redistricting debate for months and agreed that the plan picked was the best. But spurred by the debate surrounding the vote, she tried to piece together a compromise.
"I was really trying to keep people as close as possible to the schools that were near them," Nancy says. "I couldn't get it to work perfectly."
Crunching school capacity figures, Nancy followed the same guidelines as the Facilities and Future Planning Subcommittee. After a weekend of work, she could not find a better choice without creating a "singleton" elementary school, with students who would go to a different high school than all their middle school classmates. On this issue, she would not budge.
"At this age and point in their lives ... they'd rather be with their friends," Nancy said of her three daughterstwo fifth-graders at Dwight and an eighth-grader at Tomlinson. "Their friends are the most important things in their lives."
Some of the plan's opponents do not consider singletons a problem, citing kids who attend private high schools. But Catherine and her Tomlinson eighth-grader disagreed.
"To me, that's a choice you make," Catherine said. "With my daughter, we've talked about going to private school, and she said, 'I don't want to leave my friends.'"
Opponents also believe the board rushed to its decision. But Nancy, Catherine and Christine Vitale, a mother of a fourth-grader at Dwight and a Tomlinson eighth-grader, all disagreed. They all knew about the plans since June.
"Having attended the subcommittee meetings, I do think the Board of Education did listen to many of the parents who took the time over the summer to be part of the process," Christine said via email. "In the midst of all this opposition to the plan, I have yet to see a better plan presented."
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