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Redistricting committee readies options for community forum; consultant says no solution pleases everyone
Summary
The district's redistricting committee presented draft models and scheduled a community forum for Feb. 27, with consultant Tony Day urging the board to weigh trade-offs and noting the process must balance current capacity and future flexibility.
West Seneca Central School District staff and the redistricting committee provided an update at the Feb. 25 work session ahead of a community forum set for Thursday evening. Tony Day, a consultant from the Western New York Education Service Council, told the board the committee has evaluated multiple configuration options and is preparing to present models that both maintain current grade alignments and explore alternate configurations.
Day said the committee has been meeting for more than two years in some cases and has tried to test solutions against board-defined goals. "There are no answers without cost," Day told the board, emphasizing that each plan carries trade-offs and that committee members have attempted to avoid short-term fixes that create new problems. He said the committee considered configurations that preserve K–5 elementary, 6–8 middle, and 9–12 high-school alignments at the board's request, while also modeling alternatives used by other Western New York districts (for example, primary/intermediate splits).
Superintendent Lisa said the committee will present several plans at the community forum and that the district will collect public feedback through live questions, a published FAQ and a dedicated email account. She warned the board that parents will understandably focus on how specific plans affect their families and urged readiness to field individual concerns while keeping the community conversation focused on the stated goals: balancing enrollment, improving class sizes, and ensuring long-term capacity.
Tony Day and staff described the technical challenge of determining usable capacity because buildings vary: some sites have many full-sized classrooms while others include smaller rooms suitable for intervention or resource use, which affects the viability of different plans. The district plans to continue analyzing models and return to the board with refined recommendations after the community forum.
