The District is kicking off the once-a-decade process of redrawing the boundaries that determine what public schools kids will attend, an often fraught undertaking that in many other jurisdictions has prompted difficult debates about equity, racial diversity, and access to “good” schools.

D.C. officials will work with an advisory committee and members of the public for the rest of the year on a Boundary and Student Assignment Study, a document which will include recommendations on school boundaries and feeder patterns — the lines that dictate which elementary school a child has the right to attend based on where they live, and the middle and high school they will then move onto. Any proposed changes would not take effect until the 2025-2026 school year.

“We are embarking on a city-wide planning process that will provide strategic, data-informed recommendations to ensure more students have access to great schools and facilities that meet their needs,” said Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn in a statement. “This process will be essential toward our ongoing work to not only recover from the pandemic, but to continue our efforts to close the opportunity gap.”

The last time the boundaries and feeder patterns for D.C. Public Schools were redrawn was a decade ago; prior to that, it had been 30 years since any changes had been made. As part of the process in 2013 and 2014, city officials recommended boundaries be revisited regularly on a 10-year schedule. That’s similar to the redistricting process that follows the decennial U.S. Census, when ward and Advisory Neighborhood Commission boundaries are redrawn to reflect shifts in the city’s population.

Much like traditional redistricting, the process of redrawing school boundaries can draw an outsized emotional reaction from some quarters, largely because of the traditional interplay between real estate and education: people will often seek to buy or rent in areas with “good” schools, and any changes that would impact that access are often fought. But resistance from parents and families can conflict with broader government goals of diversifying schools so that they are less segregated along race and class lines, or so attendance is better balanced.

A years-long boundary study in Montgomery County that recommended modest changes to increase diversity and address overcrowding in some schools ended in 2021 without any concrete action, while in 2019 lawmakers in neighboring Howard County redrew some school boundaries after a contentious process that drew parent protests. Similar debates have played out in Arlington County and Fairfax County.

While some of those same concerns were echoed during the 2013-14 boundary redrawing process in D.C. — some parents living east of Rock Creek Park opposed proposals to pull them out of the feeder patterns to a middle and high school west of the park, for example — the city’s extensive charter school network (which educates almost half of the 90,000 kids who attend public schools) and longstanding out-of-boundary placement process has somewhat mitigated the intensity these discussions can breed.

According to a recent report on school enrollment trends from the D.C. Policy Center, 72% of D.C. students don’t attend their in-boundary public school, but the attendance rate is higher in wealthier parts of the city. Additionally, only a fraction of students stick with their designated feeder pattern as they grow up; the dramatic outlier is Jackson-Reed High School in Tenleytown, where 67% of students are in-boundary. (In Anacostia High School, it’s only 7%.)

The report found that current attendance patterns in most cases do not reflect the city’s overall racial diversity, and that some schools are significantly overcrowded while others have trouble filling their seats. Still, the possible changes to boundaries are only likely to impact a relatively small number of schools and kids.

“Boundary policies can be contentious, creating significant anxiety among families, who may be nervous about changes in their schools,” the group concluded. “But… the immediate impacts of boundary changes will be geographically concentrated, especially in neighborhoods where boundary participation rates are very high, or student representation is low, or facility utilization is too high or too low.”

The city’s study could also contemplate other policies or initiatives to better shape attendance patterns. In 2014, the advisory committee that looked at student attendance and boundaries initially proposed getting rid of by-right access to single neighborhood schools and instead giving students a menu of options within a geographic area they could apply to via a lottery. Proponents said this would help better integrate schools, but it was ultimately shelved when a number of D.C. lawmakers — including current Mayor Muriel Bowser, who then represented Ward 4 on the D.C. Council — objected.

An Advisory Committee on Student Assignment made up of parents, administrators, elected officials, and policy experts will spend the rest of the year discussing and debating school attendance patterns, boundaries, and feeder patterns before producing a set of recommendations by the end of 2023 or early 2024. There will be three public townhall meetings over the course of the year.