Report from June 19th Boundaries Meeting

The QAE PTSA and other parents from our school attended the June 19th community meeting on the Magnolia School Boundaries. There was a large crowd including parents from all the schools in Queen Anne and Magnolia. Here are our notes from the meeting:

Boundaries Survey - Great Response from the QAE Community!
SPS sent out a survey at the end of May to all families who attend schools in the Queen Anne and Magnolia areas. Queen Anne Elementary had 287 responses, the second most amongst all the schools. Thanks to our community for being so involved! QAE's overwhelming choice amongst the 13 options was Scenario C with 71% of our families selecting it as one of their top three options.

Top Boundary Options from the Survey
Ashley Davies, Director of Enrollment Planning at SPS, presented the scenarios that received the most votes in the boundaries survey. She said that nothing was final, but the original 13 options were likely narrowed down to these 5 or 6 options. She did mentioned that any of them could be tweaked as needed.

• Scenario C - one of the original six options. No change to QAE or John Hay boundaries. Portions of the current west and north Coe area are re-zoned for Magnolia and Lawton. (The QAE PTSA recommended this as one of the scenarios that does the best at adding capacity for growth while minimizing disruption across schools).
• Scenario D - one of the original six options. Similar to C, but with slight change in Blaine/Magnolia boundary dividing line. (The QAE PTSA recommended this as one of the scenarios that does the best at adding capacity for growth while minimizing disruption across schools).
• Scenario H - Switch to all schools becoming attendance area schools, no option school in Queen Anne/Magnolia cluster.
• Scenario J - Magnolia becomes the option school, all other schools are attendance area schools.
• Scenario M - Blaine becomes a K-8 option school, all other schools are attendance area schools.
• Scenario K - while this wasn't one of the top options, it appeared that they were also considering this.  In this scenario both Blaine and McClure are middle schools, all other schools are elementaries. QAE remains an option school and no K-8 at Blaine.

Impacted Students by Scenario
After the meeting, SPS published details on the number of students affected by each scenario (A-M). It ranges from a low of 306 (for J) to 816 (for M).

Magnolia School Construction Costs & Potential Delay
SPS received bids on the Magnolia School construction that were approximately $5 million over budgets. The district will likely re-look at the project and see where they can cut costs and get new bids in the fall. This likely means that the opening of Magnolia may be delayed from the beginning of the 2018-19 school year to the 2019-20 school year. This change to timeline might take away some of the sense of urgency in drawing new boundaries.  There was a concern from the audience that if new boundaries are drawn this Fall, they might have to change again prior to the school opening.

Fort Lawton Development Discussion
Some members of the audience brought up the planned development of new housing on Fort Lawton by the City of Seattle. This will add more children to the Queen Anne/Magnolia area. Audience members were advocating that the school district and the city consider using some portion of the Fort Lawton area for a new STEAM (science and environment, technology, engineering, arts, math) school.

The QAE PTSA will continue to do our best to advocate for our community and share the latest developments. See our Boundaries Info page for the latest as well as SPS's page about the meeting.