North Kingstown’s School Redistricting, Start Times and Transportation Advisory Committee met on Dec. 2 and heard an overview from consultant Fred Hajish of CDGate GIS on how the district will build attendance-area scenarios using parcel-based planning units, multi-year enrollment projections and online public-comment tools.

Hajish said the work starts with creating planning units (aggregated parcels) and linking them to enrollment projections for each grade from 2025 through 2034 so the district can see how boundary edits affect school capacity over a decade. “We use these planning units to build the attendance areas,” Hajish said, explaining that the software updates maps and a linked spreadsheet in real time as scenarios change.

The consultant demonstrated a web portal that allows residents to submit verified comments and that produces downloadable spreadsheets and aggregated sentiment reports for the district; Hajish said commenters for school plans typically see only their own verified comment while administrators receive aggregated statistics and locations. He also showed a separate routing application used to model bus stops, routes, vehicle capacities and school-start-time scenarios, and said routing is run after draft boundaries are created and selected.

Why it matters: The timeline the committee reviewed breaks the project into four phases—preparation, data collection/analysis, stakeholder engagement and recommendations/approval—and schedules public engagement tools and community meetings to begin in September 2026, a school-committee proposal presentation in December 2026 and a final recommendation to the school committee in March 2027, with implementation targeted for the 2027–28 school year.

Committee members asked that demographic indicators commonly used to measure equity—free and reduced-price lunch, English learner counts, ethnicity and other data—be included in analyses. Hajish said the software can incorporate those fields but cautioned the group about drawing boundaries that would mirror racial or income segregation, saying that has led other districts to legal challenges. “You don’t want to basically have all the rich kids go to one school and all the poor kids go to another school,” he said.

The advisory committee will review internal scenarios in February–March before selecting plans to publish for public comment. Hajish described a typical workflow in which a smaller subgroup of the advisory committee vets and refines scenarios before broader public release; committee members said they supported that approach to keep the process efficient while maintaining transparency.

The committee voted early in the meeting to move public comment to the end so residents would hear the consultant presentation first. The meeting closed after a brief public-comment period and a motion to adjourn.

The next advisory committee meeting to review draft scenarios is expected in February; the district will notify the public when the interactive mapping portal and the first scenarios are posted.