More South Elementary School students would move on to West Middle School under a redistricting plan approved in a 4-1 vote by the Andover School Committee Thursday.
The committee has spent the past several months working on redistricting maps to make more use of the new West Elementary School that opened last year. Dillinger, the district’s consultant, created multiple scenarios for redistricting elementary and middle school boundaries in Andover based on population and enrollment trends, current building utilization, and stakeholder feedback.
Under an earlier scenario, about 30 percent of South students who live in Ballardvale would have gone to West Middle, with the remaining going to Doherty Middle School. Under the scenario approved last week, about 56 percent of South Students would go to Doherty.
Lauren Diffenbach, who lives in the South Elementary neighborhood, cast the lone dissenting vote after raising concerns about the new middle school scenario presented Thursday. She said she was concerned there had not been an opportunity for public input, as there had been for the prior scenarios.
“We’ve gone through a lot of scenarios here between the elementary and the middle school, and each time a scenario has been presented, I’ve thought, ‘That’s it. That looks great’,” Diffenbach said. “And then it gets put out to the community and the feedback comes in, and suddenly I see things that I didn’t see before, and then a new iteration.”
The committee’s work is not done: it still has to develop and approve a plan for implementing redistricting by the start of the 2026-27 school year.
While no final decisions have been made, committee members signaled they were open to considering a plan where students entering fifth and eight grade in 2026-27 would be allowed to stay at their current schools. The implementation plan will likely allow kindergartners to register in 2025-26 for the school they will be redistricted to the following year.
“We need answers on implementation as fast as you can give them to us. There is so much turmoil in our families, they don’t know what’s happening,” Chandler Road resident Natasha Groden told the committee during the public comment period of Thursday’s meeting. “I know it’s a tough decision. Our families just need to be able to make choices as fast as they can.”