Warriors in Meadow Lakes won’t retreat on boundary issue

WASILLA — Jeremy Hongslo is a Wasilla guy through and through. His children attend Wasilla schools, he coaches Wasilla football and he belongs to the Greater Wasilla Chamber of Commerce as a local business owner.

So when he heard his Meadow Lakes home northwest of Church and Schrock roads would be in the new Houston schools attendance area if recommended boundary changes are approved by the Mat-Su Borough School Board, he became an angry Wasilla dad.

“We don’t live in Houston, we don’t work in Houston, we don’t shop in Houston,” Hongslo told the board Wednesday during its first reading of a proposal to shift the Wasilla schools attendance boundary for Meadow Lakes residents to Houston middle and high schools for next year. “It’s 8.3 miles from our bus stop to Wasilla High and 15.4 miles to Houston High. It doesn’t make sense. They already have an unacceptably long bus ride to school. There aren’t enough students in our area, anyway, to warrant the change.”

Hongslo was one of several parents in the Meadow Lakes North and Meadow Lakes Central areas who spoke against the boundary changes at a meeting at Knik Elementary.

He told the board he would go back to homeschooling his three children if the district doesn’t allow him to keep them in Wasilla. His fourth-grader currently attends Meadow Lakes Elementary, his sixth-grader is at Teeland Middle School and his oldest is a freshman at Wasilla High.

“This is the first year my son has attended a public school and he’s so excited about it,” Hongslo said later of his ninth-grader. “He’s been homeschooled all his life and he’s a really good kid. I’d hate for any of this to spoil his experience.”

Shannon Bingham, the school district’s planning consultant hired from the Colorado-based firm Western Demographics to help the district come up with a plan to alleviate overcrowding at Wasilla schools, said the Steering Committee is recommending allowing Meadow Lakes students currently attending Wasilla High to stay there so they can graduate from their home high school.

Meadow Lakes families with children at Wasilla Middle School would be able to keep them there until they are ready for high school, then would have to send them to Houston High, instead of Wasilla, Bingham explained of the most favored option.

One option would allow middle-schoolers who have older siblings at WHS to also attend that school when they graduate from Teeland or Wasilla middle schools. But Bingham is recommending against that option simply because of the cost of busing those students for additional years.

To bus students from Meadow Lakes to Wasilla over the next three years would cost the district $72,000 each year, Bingham said.

None of that seemed to matter to mothers Brenda Campbell, Tiffany Fitchtner and Lynette Warhus.

Fitchtner, who has two children in the Meadow Lakes South area, said she’s only seven minutes away from Wasilla High and can’t fathom having to drive her children all the way to Houston.

She said she doesn’t understand why those who are being most affected by the changes weren’t included in the focus groups surveyed by Bingham.

“We had no idea about it,” she said. “I propose you do a second focus group just of people who are directly affected.”

Hongslo, president of TCM Restoration and Cleaning, said he also didn’t know about the boundary changes until he read a Frontiersman story about it last month.

“The school sends out flyers to all the parents when there’s a field trip to a movie theater, but they can’t send them out for something as important as this?” Hongslo wondered.

MSBSD spokeswoman Catherine Esary said after the meeting that the boundary change proposals and meetings were advertised in local newspapers and school principals were supposed to find parents to be in the focus groups.

The district also held four open houses at various schools to educate communities on the changes and to collect surveys.

At the April 4 open house at Meadow Lakes Elementary, only 10 parents stopped by to check out the maps and fill out a survey.

Survey results from the open houses and focus groups show that the majority of participants believe changing attendance boundaries makes sense to solve overcrowding issues. Most of those with children in Wasilla schools favored having current students grandfathered in to avoid disrupting their school lives.

Bingham said the proposed changes would increase Houston High’s enrollment by 95 students after the three-year phase-in was completed and that because of continued rapid growth in Wasilla, Wasilla secondary schools wouldn’t notice much of a difference in numbers until a new school is built in the Knik-Goose Bay area down the road.

Most of the school board was quiet on the issue, except for Neal Lacy. Lacy said he’d like to find out from Alaska State Troopers if there would be any negative traffic impacts of having more school buses headed to Houston.

“I do not want to put any more kids on a dangerous road when they have to go to Houston High School,” Lacy said. “I want to know what (AST) Capt. Hans Brinke has to say about it.”

The board is scheduled to vote on the proposal after its second reading at the May 4 meeting at Houston High School, beginning at 6 p.m.

For more information on the boundary study and recommended proposals, go to the district website at matsuK12.us or call Catherine Esary at 746-9251.

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.