Looking Ahead: Public School Redistricting

In recent years, the Williamsburg-James City County public school district has been criticized due to perceived racial, socioeconomic and achievement inequities between constituent schools. Now, as its school board looks ahead toward adding an additional high school and redistricting based on population overcrowding, The Flat Hat is taking a look back at the district’s zoning history and examining how inequity between schools can be more effectively addressed. 

In 2017, the school board elected not to redistrict zoning boundaries for its three high schools after conducting months of planning, crafting six different map plans and hosting multiple community meetings. All six proposed maps were met with contention from parents and concerns from school board members, forcing the school board to abandon redistricting. Parents raised fears about their children changing schools, traveling longer distances and being forced to attend less academically successful institutions. Despite these fears over high school redistricting, redistricting plans for the district’s four middle schools proceeded in order to reach occupancy at the newly constructed James Blair Middle School, which lies just a mile north of the College of William and Mary’s campus.

“The thought was that neighborhood schools are good for the community, and that seemed to carry the day,” sociology professor and Lafayette parent Jennifer Mendez said. “However, neighborhood schools can also be pretty homogenous schools, but that did not carry the day.”

Mendez said that she is disappointed by the racial inequities that persist between Williamsburg-James City County schools, particularly between Lafayette High School and Jamestown High School. 

“The issues important to consider are, first of all, we do know diverse learning environments are beneficial to all kids; we also know African American and racial minority kids do better in mixed schools as opposed to schools that are almost exclusively black and brown,” Mendez said. “... I feel the environment at Jamestown is an unhealthy homogenous environment. And the only reason I would want my kids to go to Jamestown is there are more AP classes there, more opportunities.”

Lafayette senior Brenna Weber-Smith said that there is a rivalry between Lafayette and Jamestown. She said that students at Lafayette tend to stereotype Jamestown students as being whiter and wealthier while Lafayette is more racially diverse.

“As a stereotype, there’s a ‘rich kids who are entitled and think that they’re better than us’,” Weber-Smith said.

Using publicly accessible data from the Virginia Department of Education, The Flat Hat conducted an analysis to operationalize persistent inequalities within the Williamsburg-James City County district. After comparing data on the race and free and reduced lunch qualifications for the 2018-19 school year for Jamestown High School, Lafayette High School, Warhill High School, Berkeley Middle School, Toano Middle School, Lois Hornsby Middle School and James Blair Middle School, differences between the schools became clear. 

The percentage of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch is often used as a surrogate for measuring household income. While this method has its drawbacks — the National Center for Education Statistics gauges that the number of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch is often higher than the number of students living in poverty — it is still a useful variable in predicting relative levels of socioeconomic status.

According to Mendez, Jamestown High School and Lafayette High School have been historically cast as rivals with drastically different student bodies and test scores. In the 2018-2019 school year, Jamestown’s student population was 70 percent white and 30 percent nonwhite, while Lafayette’s students were 55 percent white and 45 percent nonwhite. In the same school year, 18 percent of Jamestown students qualified for free or reduced lunch while 33 percent of Lafayette students qualified. 

During the failed redistricting effort in 2017, the school board offered multiple different map options that strived to address inequity between the schools. However, according to Jamestown Board of Supervisors Chair Jim Icenhour because parents have chosen their residences partly based on what school their children will be attending. He said there is a perceived difference in the quality of education between the schools that is difficult to fight. Jamestown students rank score at or above the state average on most SOL exams in English, mathematics and science while Lafayette students score below or slightly below the state average on the same. 

The vocal group of parents that Icenhour refers to as the “PTA mafia” can be very effective and exert tremendous pressure on the school board.

“I call it the PTA mafia,” Icenhour said. “The moms and dads get together, and one of the reasons they come here is because of the high-quality schools. And if there is a perception that there is a better school then they want their kids to go there. That’s one of the things we’re having to try and convince people, we want to put the resources in and have the equal opportunity for people to get the education they need and the same quality education they need. When you’re fighting a perception of a difference in quality or funding or emphasis from one school to the other that’s frustrating … the hard part is convincing people that you put the resources there and they should take that into account.”

Of the school board’s seven members, five are elected and two are appointed. Icenhour spoke about the ways that the school board listens to constituent input, including community forums and surveys. However, since not all parents and community members routinely vote, especially for local positions like the school board, the board is fairly limited in what individuals they respond to. According to Icenhour, this limitation does not universally drive outcomes, but community input should be considered where it is given.

“Had they done it, we would be better off today, but they were not able to muster the votes to do it on the school board,” Icenhour said.

According to school board member Kyra Cook, the board considers keeping neighborhoods together and enforcing equity between schools when pursuing redistricting plans. In 2017, the stated criteria for the school board when considering redistricting included balancing socioeconomic status and keeping neighborhoods intact. According to Mendez, the term “socioeconomic status” was used as a proxy for race — as no one explicitly referred to the issue of racial inequity between schools — and Cook said that addressing inequity between the schools is not simply a matter of redistricting because inequity can be mitigated through other methods more effectively.

“Attendance is one of the ways to address equity, but it is not the only way, and certainly not the best way,” Cook said.

According to Icenhour, the school board attempts to keep zoning boundaries contiguous and aims to avoid gerrymandering so students in the same neighborhoods can attend the same schools. However, the abundance of isolated neighborhoods and meandering cul-de-sacs throughout the district creates additional challenges for keeping neighborhoods together while creating balanced schools. Icenhour said that there is also self-imposed economic segregation in Williamsburg and James City County, where parents can only find affordable housing concentrated in certain areas. 

“When it came down to it, the board was just not willing to do it,” Icenhour said. “I think there was just too much pressure on them from Jamestown High School parents whose kids would have been moved out of the district. So it was a let’s just defer that decision, that food fight, until we actually do the physical plant changes and we’ve got to do it.”

The School Board previously redistricted in 2007 and 2018, and both processes were emotional and drawn-out affairs. For this reason, Icenhour said that the school board wants to draw more permanent districts that will minimize community pushback. 

According to Mendez, redistricting will have to occur soon since all three high schools are currently over or nearing capacity. Jamestown is at 109 percent capacity, Lafayette is at 87 percent and Warhill is at 94 percent, signifying that all institutions are nearing their thresholds for student occupancy. This has impacted Jamestown severely, so much so that it currently uses trailers behind the school to accommodate all their students. 

These utilization rates also directly affect the funding each of these schools receives and determines how they can support their students with advanced classes, facilities, extracurricular activities and teacher instruction. Therefore, many parents are very concerned about their children attending the best-funded, and thus the best-attended, high schools in the district. According to Icenhour, these concerns create a self-perpetuating cycle where parents push for their students to attend what they consider to be the best schools — which are also the most over-utilized ones — which increases their enrollment even more, exacerbating over-enrollment.

“It’s difficult for me as one of the board members who funds this thing to see one way overcrowded and one underutilized,” Icenhour said. “That’s just not an efficient use of the taxpayers’ money.”

According to Mendez, this funding system is the real cause of inequalities between the district’s schools, rather than the zoning boundaries themselves. She said that during the 2017 redistricting process, many Lafayette parents wanted to push the numbers of students attending Lafayette up to reach full capacity so the school could receive more funding.

“Lafayette parents tried to use the redistricting to talk about the funding structure issue and how it would be good to mix up where wealthy kids go so they aren’t all going to one school,” Mendez said.

This unequal utilization is particularly frustrating for Icenhour, who said he would like to see additional capacity at Jamestown moving forward, as well as redrawing the districts so that less students are going there. According to Icenhour, there are plans for expansions to all three high schools over the next five to six years.

Mendez remarked on the difficulty of having her child attend Lafayette, but bussed to Jamestown in order to receive Advanced Placement instruction in classes not offered at Lafayette.

“My son was bussed to Jamestown to take an AP Music Theory class and he lost 30 minutes of instructional time,” Mendez said.

According to Icenhour, there is some concern that the school board has not properly spent the money allocated to them by the county’s Board of Supervisors. He said that while he and the rest of the board of supervisors can theoretically attach conditional strings to the funds that they give to the school board, they have found that it is better to sit down and talk through any concerns they might have as opposed to micromanaging. 

Mendez also expressed her concerns about representation on the school board possibly affecting their priorities for the district. 

“I think that in our community the entire school board should not be white, I think the school board should represent other voices,” Mendez said. “Our schools should look like our community. And they don’t because there are higher concentrations in different schools.”