Tracy Press

 
Time to choose school boundaries to accommodate Kimball High School.

Funding is secured — developer fees, matching state money and interest income. What to build has been determined — library, seven classroom buildings, swimming pool, football stadium, auditorium, library, shops, administration building, gym-cafeteria and sports fields. And so has programming — academies in health services, mass communications, construction technology/management and college prep.

Oh, and there will be classes in Mandarin.

What’s left to figure out for Tracy’s third comprehensive high school is this: Just who will attend the $74 million John C. Kimball High School when it opens in the fall of 2009?

That’s the question of the season, and one that a committee of 30 people who represent every school in Tracy Unified School District and every school district in the Tracy area has worked hard to answer. Proposed boundaries for a three-high school town have been unveiled at public meetings this month, with a final board vote expected in late May.

The committee members considered everything imaginable: traffic patterns, railroad crossings, community and neighborhood areas, enrollment numbers, school “feeder” patterns and Global Positioning System data.

The new high school will be built just south of 11th Street on the east side of Lammers Road, which will be expanded to four lanes. The proposed boundaries divide Tracy into three sections — roughly north, west and east.

Under the plan, students north of 11th Street and students at Villalovoz Elementary will attend West High, with the exception of students at Central Elementary and rural Banta School, who will go to Tracy High. Jefferson School District attendees and those who live south of 11th Street and east of Tracy Boulevard, with the exception of Poet-Christian students, will also attend Tracy High. And west of Tracy Boulevard, including Jefferson’s Traina School and all of Mountain House and the Lammersville School District, will go to Kimball High.

It’s not perfect, that much is clear.

Williams Middle School students will split up for high school, because Williams is too large to feed just one school. Jefferson’s Traina School students won’t go to Tracy High, but the rest of the Jefferson district will. Students at Poet Christian School, which is a visual and performing-arts magnet school, won’t attend Tracy High, which offers a performing-arts magnet program, unless they get intra-district transfers.

A parent who attended a boundary meeting this week said she wasn’t happy at all with the proposal. She’ll have to drop one of her children at Tracy High and the other at Kimball High when it opens.

Another parent questioned why his neighborhood just east of Lammers Road and north of 11th Street is in the West High boundaries. He’s already figured out he’ll have to drive 2.8 miles through five traffic lights to take his child to West High, compared with one traffic light and a quarter-mile to go to Kimball High.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” he said.

What does make sense is that with the opening of Kimball High, Tracy and West high schools will immediately downsize, relieving intense overcrowding on both campuses. And even if Mountain House has its own high school in 10 years — the Lammersville District voted to unify earlier this week — students may come out of Tracy Hills southwest of town to take their place at Kimball High. That is, until Jefferson unifies and has its own high school.

For now, though, the boundaries aren’t set in stone, and it’s a good time for Tracy parents to take a critical look at what’s proposed.

At a glance

• The last public meeting is 7 p.m. April 2 at Freiler Elementary School, 2421 W. Lowell Ave. 

• To see the boundary map: http://www.tracy.k12.ca.us.

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written by seedeem , March 23, 2008

After viewing the proposed 3 high school boundary map in Sunday's TP it is apparent the article omitted some important information. TP mentioned the committee even considered Global Positioning Data, but the article failed to mention special interest and the lack of logic used in determining the boundaries. I should suspect whoever drew the map was a retired gerreymanderer, carving out a little niche hear and there as favors to "special interest". The site chosen for Kimball High School makes as much since as the site picked for the fire station on west 11th St., more gridlock with no means of exit during commute time. A logical map would use boundaries following the four main compass points, North, South, East and West and not contain the zigg'n and zagg'n of the current proposal. Keep it simple and remember it is for the students and one should not have to transverse 5 signal lights and 2.8 miles when a neighborhood school is only one light and a 0.25 mile away.

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written by Fed Up , March 23, 2008

I agree the current plan is choppy and inconsistent. Poet Christian is closer to Tracy High and it has the Arts Academy. Traina may actually be farther from Kimball than any other school in the Jefferson District. People across 11th from Kimball will attend West.

What is going on?

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written by Jim Lamb , March 25, 2008

From my understanding, the original 30 members of the steering committee took into consideration things other than proximity. It was important to many administrators that students not be separated from their peers, so there was a strong effort to have all the students from individual elementary schools go to the same high school. As a result the new boundaries for the high school ended up closely reflecting boundaries for elementary schools.

Arguably it is more important to have proximity more important to elementary schools than high schools.

In a perfect world all three high schools would be in different locations altogether. Unfortunately, Tracy's not a planned development, and schools have been built as needed in the available space at the time. Had Tracy anticipated 100 years of growth 100 years ago, land could have been put aside for future high school developments.

The placement of Kimball I'm sure reflects the likely continued growth of Tracy to the West.