This is 2017 HCPSS Area Attendance Committee’s feedback to HCPSS and BOE. There are a lot of great and useful recommendations to HCPSS and BOE and I truly appreciate their difficult and important work last summer. I believe those recommendations will help this year’s AAC. By the way, HCPSS will release a new 2019-2020 redistricting proposal in June, 2018.
It includes recommendations in several areas: administrative, planning, field work and planning. All of them are very useful except one recommendation which says: “if a parent makes a thread, bullying to AAC members, their children should be disciplined.” This is totally wrong. I am not sure how the committee signed off this recommendation.
I would like to add two more recommendations:
- Assign a score to each adjustment with the polygon change, i.e., we need assign each factor in Policy 6010 with a weight (one example, for those 13 factors in Policy 6010, each has an equal weight of 1/13 = 7.7%) . In this way, we will prevent one factor dominating everything else. And we can always compare the score for each polygon manipulation objectively.
- Estimate the bus transportation cost in real time while AAC members are doing the polygon swap. If HCPSS is not able to do it now, they should hire some people with the skills to provide the numbers during the discussion. We should always be conscientious of the cost. For example, for each polygon move, we should be able to tell how much bus transportation will be increased/decreased comparing to the current level (benchmark). This cost change will be weighted into the overall performance score for the redistricting.
