Genoa residents concerned Westerville redistricting

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Genoa Town­ship res­i­dent Joe Bar­ganier attended last Thurs­day evening’s Genoa Town­ship Board of Trustees meet­ing to express con­cerns about the West­er­ville City School District’s ele­men­tary school redistricting.

The West­er­ville school dis­trict is con­sid­er­ing four alter­na­tive plans for redis­trict­ing. If the dis­trict selects Alter­na­tive 3, some Genoa Town­ship stu­dents cur­rently attend­ing Alcott Ele­men­tary School and Fouse Ele­men­tary School may be bused out of Genoa Town­ship to Pointview Ele­men­tary School to help bal­ance dis­trict demographics.

Bar­ganier said chil­dren liv­ing in the impacted neigh­bor­hoods should all go to the same ele­men­tary school; and that many res­i­dents move to a neigh­bor­hood based on the schools their chil­dren would be attending.

“We made major finan­cial deci­sions based on where our chil­dren would go to school,” Bar­ganier said. “If we had wanted our kids to go to a dif­fer­ent school, we would have moved to a dif­fer­ent neighborhood.”

Bar­ganier also said that send­ing chil­dren to a school other than their neigh­bor­hood school would cause a decline in home val­ues that will also affect other home­own­ers in the area because com­par­isons for sales are drawn from nearby areas.

“This affects the entire neigh­bor­hood, not just res­i­dents with ele­men­tary age school chil­dren,” Bar­ganier said. “A decline in hous­ing val­ues ulti­mately equates to a decline in rev­enue for the school district.”

Bar­ganier also noted the impact of mov­ing stu­dents to a school a 20-minute drive away from home would be chal­leng­ing for work­ing par­ents and decrease oppor­tu­ni­ties for involve­ment in school activities.

He also cited longer bus routes, and lack of teacher, staff and peer con­ti­nu­ity as hav­ing a neg­a­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal impact on the ele­men­tary students.

“This sends a mes­sage that West­er­ville is so unpre­dictable that you can’t expect to attend the school as the bound­aries are drawn when you move into the dis­trict,” Bar­ganier added. “This would be detri­men­tal to home­own­ers and to the rep­u­ta­tion of our com­mu­nity. What assur­ances do any West­er­ville res­i­dents have that it couldn’t also hap­pen to them? What mes­sage is being sent to our com­mu­nity and to oth­ers about our community?”

Bar­ganier said con­cerned res­i­dents are hold­ing a 6:30 p.m. open house at Alcott Ele­men­tary School on Tues­day, Feb­ru­ary 19. Inter­ested res­i­dents are encour­aged to attend the open house.

Posted by Gary Henery on Feb 12 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.