Lake Orion to use a phased approach to redistricting middle schools

By Megan Kelley

Review Writer

During the past several meetings of the Lake Orion Community Schools Board of Education, the topic of enrollment, specifically at the middle school level, has been touched on numerous times.

In prior meetings, district administration informed the board that enrollment numbers across the three middle schools (Oakview, Waldon and Scripps) was uneven.

In December, LOCS Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Rick Arnett provided enrollment numbers to the board. According to those documents, Lake Orion had 1,511 students, including both resident enrollment and school of choice enrollment, across all three middle schools. By building, Scripps’ enrollment was at 585 students, Waldon’s was 536 students and Oakview’s was just 390 students.

Though district administrators were clear that they did not believe the uneven student distribution was a “problem”, there were concerns on the board with how it impacts programming, staffing and other operations.

In the months that followed, the district continued to look at the enrollment data to decide their best options going forward.

One option that was nearly immediately thrown out was closing a school; another was repurposing a middle school into an elementary school.

“We’re very confident that our numbers indicate that we cannot close a building,” Arnett said. “We would be at (building) capacity. We’re currently at capacity at our elementaries. We have very little room for growth. Our middle schools, if we were to go to two (buildings), we would be at a maximum capacity and would not be efficient with our middle school concept.”

While there were a handful of other options, district administration sought a solution that would be effective, but as non-disruptive as possible.

During their meeting on March 9, Arnett announced that the route forward for Lake Orion middle schools was redistricting, but as a phased-in approach.

“There was a pretty obvious solution that came about that was, in my opinion and the opinions of those who helped work through this, a pretty simple solution that had minimal disruption,” Arnett said.

“So, the recommended plan moving forward would be to — I use the word ‘annex’ some people ‘redistrict’– a section of the district at the southern, easternmost point of our district that is currently within the Scripps boundary and redistribute that to the Oakview boundary,” he said.

The portion of the district that is expected to be redistricted is the Stonegate neighborhood, located in the south-easternmost point of the LOCS district and is currently within the Scripps boundary.

Additionally, the redistricting will include three other developments in that same relative area, south of Silverbell Road: Oakland Ridge, Silverbell Village and Heron Springs Townhomes and Apartments.

As administrators had stated before, the less disruptive the solution the better and this solution allows room for a phased approach to redistricting.

“That would look like taking our current fifth graders that reside within that designated boundary and having them move to Oakview, keeping anyone that is in that neighborhood currently as a fifth or sixth-grader who would be moving up to sixth or seventh grade next year, allowing them to finish out their career at Scripps if they chose to do so,” said Arnett.

This will be similar for students with siblings.

“Recognizing that there may be some siblings within that, (and parents) who don’t want to have two kids going to two different middle schools, I dug into the data there and quite surprisingly we only had five families who fell into that realm of having an older sibling and an incoming fifth-grader,” Arnett said. “So, those fifth graders that were incoming would have the option of following their sibling to Scripps and finishing out their career at Scripps, or the entire family could have the option of going to Oakview to the new designated area.”

According to Arnett, there were no families with an older sibling and a fourth-grade student. This is good news for LOCS because this allows for the transition to take place all within one year.

“By doing so (redistricting), we would more evenly distribute our students next year. Twenty-nine percent of the population of middle school would be at Oakview, 35 (percent) at Scripps and 36 (percent) at Waldon.”

Without redistricting, the distribution would be 25 percent at Oakview, 39 percent at Scripps and 36 percent at Waldon.

LOCS has also received information from Orion Township on upcoming developments, many of which are in the Scripps and Waldon middle school boundaries.

The families with older siblings are expected to be contacted by the district regarding the switch.