Binghamton board reviews elementary redistricting scenarios that would affect 331 students

Superintendent Tanya told the Binghamton Board of Education on Aug. 19 that staff have prepared four redistricting scenarios that together would relocate 331 students of the district’s roughly 2,266 elementary population in order to rebalance class sizes and free classroom space for alternative uses.

The plan matters because the district has not re-evaluated elementary attendance boundaries in more than 40 years and is seeking to keep average class sizes near 16–18 while also preserving neighborhood schools and creating usable space that could be rented or repurposed if enrollment remains low.

Tanya said the scenarios try to avoid “big big shifts” such as sending entire neighborhoods across the city, and instead target pockets of students who live near different schools. She described a pink “scenario 1” and several other reassignments that would change clustering patterns (for example moving some students currently assigned to Woodrow Wilson to Franklin or Roosevelt) and open space in buildings such as Wilson for possible community or program use. “One of the objectives again was in looking at redistricting … how does it take possibly 2 or 3 empty spaces here, 2 or 3 empty spaces here … and create that empty space in a building that could be utilized for something else?” she said.

The superintendent and staff presented street-level data and a chart that, they said, lists the number of students on each street and how each scenario would reassign them. The packet the superintendent distributed excluded prekindergarten counts; she said pre-K has roughly a 30% turnover over two years and was therefore not included in these calculations. The scenarios assume no further enrollment decline and do not factor in additional staff costs such as classroom aides.

Board members pressed on several practical impacts. One member asked how cluster changes would affect English-language learners; Tanya said ELL students are currently clustered at Woodrow Wilson, Franklin and Roosevelt and that some ELL pupils live outside Wilson’s catchment, which is a factor in the suggested moves. A board member said she was concerned that moving about 56 ELL students away from their neighborhood peers would impose additional burdens and argued services should be delivered closer to students’ neighborhoods. Tanya replied staff were modeling teacher allocation (for example 0.25 or 0.75 ELL teacher needs per building) and that the district lacks the staffing to maintain self-contained ELL classrooms in multiple sites without added expense.

Transportation and student safety were discussed repeatedly. Tanya said the district is running a BOCES transportation study to examine whether BOCES could provide some runs; current elementary bus routes can exceed 40 minutes because runs must also serve other sites and the middle school pickup schedules. The board also heard that many of the students the district aims to reassign include homeless or transient families, and that stability and housing turnover complicate projections.

Multiple board members urged caution to preserve neighborhood school identity. One member said the First Ward would view reassignment as an erosion of neighborhood history and asked staff to show an intermediate “scenario 2” that would restore some First Ward assignments to Wilson. Another member recommended staff mark the specific streets of concern so the board and public can see a side-by-side map and numbers.

Tanya said no vote would be taken this summer. She invited board members to building walkthroughs scheduled the following week (Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann and West Middle on Tuesday; Franklin, Coolidge, East Middle School and the high school on Wednesday) and asked them to email suggested adjustments; she said staff will bring refined maps, updated ethnicity/poverty impact charts, and alternate scenarios back to the board in coming meetings.

Next steps: staff to produce color maps that highlight the streets named by board members, run revised scenarios (including a “split-the-difference” option requested by some trustees), provide updated transportation modeling and return with data at a future public meeting. No formal action was taken at the Aug. 19 meeting.