School board makes right call when deciding against dividing Wasilla

Until Wednesday night, the Mat-Su School District board was considering moving some Wasilla schoolchildren from Wasilla schools to Teeland Middle School to better use classroom space.

On paper, that sounds like a good idea. To parents, not so good.

In addition to having farther to go if they have to pick up or drop off students, parents would see their children separated from chums they’ve gone to school with through their elementary grades. Those kinds of relationships can last lifetimes if they finish high school together.

In a letter to the Frontiersman — and also presented to the school board — Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright was rightfully indignant about the possibility of children being bused to Teeland.

And in full disclosure, Rupright said his family was directly affected.

In the letter, he compared the proposed redistricting to an effort in Boston back in the 1970s where “the federal government, in order to put into place desegregation in the Boston Public Schools, seized control of the school district and forced the busing of children across lines.”

He said the move failed because children were taken from their neighborhoods and families and thrust into places where they did not have the support system they grew up with.

The mayor’s comparison might be a stretch considering nobody’s talking about moving students from a predominately black neighborhood to a predominately Irish neighborhood or to Chinatown. But his point is well-taken.

Children form bonds early in life. Too often people in charge look at the numbers, but don’t see the faces affected.

This could be a learning tool as the district faces challenges of where to build new schools and how to use existing classroom space better.

In the latter, maybe some students could be “grandfathered” into a school while newcomers could be sent to schools that aren’t yet at capacity and where they will be starting over no matter what school they attend.

Maybe parents could opt to move their children to a school with fewer students so they would have more teacher attention.

Yes, there are options such as boundary exemptions where parents can choose a school outside the boudaries of where they live. That comes with no bus service. For working parents, that’s not a practical choice. There should be more ways to best use school space now and in the future than just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand.