Middle School Boundary Review: Balancing Enrollment and Fostering Diversity

Tacoma Public Schools (TPS), a large and primarily urban district, was experiencing an imbalance in student enrollment, requiring an update of middle school attendance area boundaries. Maintaining the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity among schools while balancing attendance at individual schools was one of TPS’s central concerns. TPS also needed to plan for the reopening of a middle school in the 2021–2022 school year.

FLO assisted TPS with boundary review processes for all middle schools. This review incorporated enrollment forecasting data, program placement modeling, capacity analysis and the facilitation of a ten-week boundary review committee process.  To ensure diversity was maintained across attendance areas and throughout the school system, FLO retrieved data from TPS’s Student Information System, which included data about race and ethnicity and socioeconomic levels of students.

Our customizable, web-based decision-support tools empowered committee members and TPS representatives (student services staff, transportation staff, and principals) to ask and then answer in real time their own questions about the effects that a boundary scenario may have on student demographics and school capacities. Middle school boundaries for 2017–2018 and 2021–2022, including the reopening of a middle school and new attendance area, were approved by TPS’s board on December 13, 2016. According to TPS leadership, the interactive mapping and analysis tools were central to the success of the boundary review process.