Neighborhood schools

THE current Seattle Public Schools student-assignment plan is a Byzantine set of enrollment rules and procedures both costly and complex. Coupled with the uneven quality of the city schools, families must navigate a system that is inherently inequitable. Broad school choice plus transportation has been the district's panacea, but they also contributed to the system's excessive cost.

An overhaul that will include redrawing attendance boundaries and moving around special service programs, proposed by Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, is the better solution. The first part of the plan is impressive.

Set to take effect fall 2010, it offers a comfortable level of predictability and efficiency. Neighborhood schools, as opposed to citywide busing, offer cohesion and a level of intimacy among families. It allows schoolmates to move through the system together. Most parents would find the prospects of play dates and after-school activities easier to manage if their assigned school were practically within walking distance.

The attraction of running a more cost-efficient enrollment system should not be discounted. The district needs to trim expenses by $34 million for the 2009-10 school year, it must also get a handle on district expenses which have been rising faster than revenues.

The School Board has much to consider as it fills in the contours of the plan with specifics. Here are a few principles boardmembers should keep in mind:

• The superintendent must make good on her promise to improve the quality of the city's 90-some schools, particularly struggling ones in the Central Area and South End. The proposed plan's foundation rests on the assumption that most families will accept their neighborhood school assignment. For that assumption to bear out, those schools must be academically up to par.

• Keeping siblings together ought to be a top priority. The district has sought to smooth the new transition by allowing students to stay at their current schools. But there will not be a preference for their siblings. It is a complicated matter worthy of board attention.

• The district's plan to shift services such as special education, bilingual and advanced learning into many schools rather than a few is ambitious but worthwhile. The board should hold the district to this principle.

School boundaries in Seattle haven't been updated in decades. Demographic shifts may spur future changes. Families can stay informed and offer input through a series of public meetings, including ones specifically for advocates of bilingual, special education and gifted education. Information on the proposed assignment plan and public meetings can be found by going to http://www.seattleschools.org/area/newassign/app_framework.pdf