The South Orange-Maplewood School District is continuing to explore a two-zone model for the Intentional Integration Initiative, according to officials.
Supt. Jason Bing first publicly discussed potential zone modifications at a town hall-style Community Conversations event on October 14. His comments at that time focused more on changing the socioeconomic status (SES) variance for student placements. The 5% variance was a major topic of discussion in the recent Board of Education election campaign, with the winning slate of Malini Nayar, Paul Stephan and Meredith Higgins voicing opposition to changing the variance.
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Bing tied the proposed modifications to transportation, noting that the Intentional Integration Initiative, or Triple I, was one of several cost drivers contributing to the district’s $10.5M transportation expenditure. (Other drivers are Out of District Placements and Pre K. The district is now considering ending pre-K busing for less than 2 miles for next year.) The district has also struggled to get students to school on time via bus, and is exploring bringing some transportation services in house.
In an interview with Village Green published on Oct. 16, Michael Alves of The Alves Group, SOMSD’s integration consultant, confirmed that his group was working on testing models for the Triple I — including looking at the impact of increased variances as well as creating two zones that would contain three elementary schools each.
Regarding zones, Alves said, “We feel if we go to two zones, in other words, keep the algorithm and you can figure out what kind of variance you want. But the whole purpose would be self-contained. That you live in one zone or the other, and that’s your three schools, and you get assigned to the school nearest your home when they have to figure out some kids be inter-zone. But that should contain the busing.”
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“My approach has always been to mediate legitimate interest,” said Alves. “And if we have a legitimate issue driving transportation, let’s work on that.”
At the November 20 Board of Education meeting, Deidre Brown, said that the Rutgers Implementation Committee, which she chairs, had meetings with Alves on October 15, October 30, and “just recently.”
Deirdre Brown
“One of the things that they provided to the full Board was a memo outlining a potential plan,” said Brown. “Alves is currently conducting further beta testing on the two-zone three-school model, which again, that two zone model is Zone A would be Seth Boyden, Tuscan, and Delia Bolden feeding into Maplewood Middle School. And then Zone B would be Clinton, Marshall and South Mountain feeding into South Orange Middle School. As it does its work, the district will need to consider special education and multilingual programming across zones. Simultaneously, the district stated that the special services department is currently reviewing and creating a plan for services that the district should bring in-house. The district needs to expand its in-house services and continue its emphasis on multi-tiered system of support to better support students’ needs.”
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“Other considerations if we move to a two-zone model include inter-zone moves,” said Brown. “So if one family moves from one part of town to another, what would be allowed in that situation? And also how would sibling priority for the current Triple I model feed into any new model? It was stated that implementation of a two zone model may be targeted for the ’27-’28 school year.”
However, Brown said that if the district waits another year, transportation issues will persist and “there’ll be 100-plus more students to bus next year.”
BOE member Jeff Bennett commented that “since our Triple I launched, it’s been sometimes called a modified Berkeley plan, but … if we did adopt a two-sets-of-three program, it actually would be like Berkeley in a significant way, since Berkeley does divide itself into three zones and has three or four schools. … I’ve heard that actually almost no one in Berkeley has a ride over half an hour, which is one reason why Berkeley’s integration plan is well accepted.”
BOE member Bimal Kapadia said he wanted to “urge the district that whatever we can look at from a budgetary perspective, that we look for anything that we can do in the next school year, as soon as possible … because when we know that there are costs and efficiencies that we can make in savings as it relates to busing, transportation, logistics, staffing, time lost and learning from the students being late on the buses, any recognition of savings that we can do on those sides will prevent any excessive cuts that we have to do in the short term that we can’t get back, like on staffing or teacher cuts.”
Brown reiterated, “I really would hope that we can move towards a two-zone three-school model. … Preliminary data shows that it very much does balance the schools the way that we want to as part of an integration plan, but it also clearly makes transportation much more manageable because just simply the distance is less.”
BOE 2nd Vice President Regina Eckert added, “I want to reiterate, as we keep talking about our budget and transportation, just a reminder that our budget reflects our priorities. There’s just a lot of discussion around the upcoming budget work, centering teaching and learning, not legacy structures. It is really unfortunate what is happening in our neighboring districts. I follow very closely what’s happening in Montclair and it’s really devastating what happened with West Orange last year. And so as the committees continue to have those conversations, I just want to ensure that, as we all have stated, we want to really save as much as we can in the classroom. And while we all may have different opinions on how the integration plan moves forward and potentially modifies, I hope that we can just come to that conclusion that that is what is the most important, what is happening in our classrooms.”
