By KRISTEN RICHARDSON
Special to Brentwood Home Page
I spent a recent Monday night and the day after churning ideas through my head about where to go from here. Last Monday was the meeting where the Williamson County Board of Education voted 10-2 for the county-wide rezoning plan. When I ask, I know some of you will identify and say ‘Yes, I was disappointed in the vote,’ but for me, it might not be for the reasons you think. 

When I started this journey last year, it began at a neighborhood meeting to discuss the potential rezoning of our development from Ravenwood High School to Centennial High School. All I thought about was my tiny little portion of the rezoning and how it would impact our area.  I didn’t even intend to be a leader in the group; I just volunteered to facilitate that particular meeting for a friend who called for the meeting but wasn’t comfortable leading it.

My role took on a life of its own from there. Other Cool Springs developments began to contact each other and the neighborhood organizers engaged into one group to see what we might do as a larger group. Even at that point my focus was still our Cool Springs area. Our community felt such pride when last year’s proposed rezoning was stopped. Despite the fact we represented only Cool Springs, our end goal was for the Central Office to take a county-wide look and see what made the most sense for the entire county.

We had visions that a long, involved process of school board, parent and central office discussions would ensue. Then, this past September, another new rezoning plan was released. And the process began anew again. Ten months had passed and no parent interaction was sought from the school board or the central office prior to a proposed rezoning.

In my Cool Springs-area neighborhood, the processes began pretty much the same as they had done a year prior. The various neighborhood organizers met. We attended public meetings en mass and e-mails sailed across the Internet at lightning speed.

The organizers tried to step it up a notch this time and we actively engaged board members outside of our district as well as Superintendent of Schools Dr. Mike Looney to get them to help us understand the plan.

Somewhere along the line, we started communicating across the county and meeting other neighborhood organizers. As I met these counterparts across the district and listened to their plight, my goal took on a different meaning. I saw far beyond my own neighborhood and looked at the county. My eyes were opened to too many neighborhoods that had ceased to function as neighborhoods due to the countless rezoning of their children. They were neighborhoods divided. It was an awful sight.

Could you ever imagine that rezoning children from one school to another would tear the fabric of a community?  Imagine places in Williamson County where neighbors have ugly exchanges over the opinion of the best feeder pattern for the neighborhood! Some neighborhoods have three houses in a row where each high school student attends a different high school. Does that startle you? It did me.

From that point forward I began to think differently. I began to pay attention to the plan and the impact it had on the county as a whole. I couldn’t get comfortable with any plan, none of them felt right. I struggled over why a plan couldn’t create larger groups of students who would migrate from one level to the next, together. It was obvious we had geographic challenges in the county that would complicate the feeder patterns. I tried crunching numbers to make it work out in my mind, but I couldn’t make it work. Never mind I was working with high level numbers anyway; did I really think I was going to be able to see it without the details?

All of the issues that my neighborhood had in common with other county neighbors began to take on a new urgency. I pursued with renewed interest, a different approach that would produce a more equitable outcome. If Edulog was run with proximity as its main parameter, would that change things? The neighborhoods and I struggled to find out; we never did. 

Did the process have to move so quickly? What was the rush? It seemed there were never enough hours in the day to meet with other neighbors, spend time on the phone with even more, and slow down enough to get a grip on the whole situation.

I knew six months was spent setting up Edulog, and two months were spent churning out three different plans.  The central office had to work 18-hour days, sometimes seven days a week. I knew they were working extremely hard and diligently, but I couldn’t understand against what deadline? I never resolved that question either.

In the end, the neighborhoods across the county paired up and created a Web site and a petition to get the word out. We realized the only people to take notice were the ones who lived in areas where the change in schools would impact their children. Just as I had not paid attention in the past when my kids weren’t affected, so did all those whose lives were going on as usual. We wondered, "How do we get them involved?"  Could we garner support to really change the process? Though the group had differences of opinion on what should be presented and how it should be presented, we managed to find a way to each express our own parts and accept what others put out there with us in honor of supporting each other for what we believed was a greater cause.

In the end, the central office was able to pass the third rezoning plan. None of the three plans varied wildly.  Each came up with about the same geographic areas to be affected just different feeder patterns applied. The greatest change, and so well deserved, was the dual zoning of east Brentwood’s Southern Woods and surrounding developments. This is one neighborhood that had been so fragmented by rezoning over the last eight years, they needed that to heal. In time, if they aren’t rezoned again, I think they will heal. 

And so here I am, sorely disappointed that our group was unable to make any headway into the process and that I couldn’t help the larger community, not just Cool Springs.

Am I disheartened for Cool Springs? Oh YES, absolutely. But when I look at other areas of the county, those who have smaller split feeders, those whose neighborhood can’t be a neighborhood, I see we fared better than some.

The greater part of my disappointment is for the whole county. We said all we could say. We worked to exhaustion and in the end nothing changed and the plan passed. I wanted more for our county. I wanted more for our children, our families. I wanted children to have the opportunity to experience the easy confidence that comes with knowing your buddies know you, to experience the sense of community that comes from having a shared history with a group of kids.  If you haven’t had a chance to read Melissa Mitchell’s commentary in the Sept. 14 edition of The Tennessean, “Community will prevail in school rezoning battle,” I recommend it. It is eloquently written. I wanted the confidence as a parent that comes with knowing the children (and those children’s parents) with whom your children attend school.

Just so we’re clear, it wasn’t about the schools.  Those issues became superficial as we became more educated about the make-up and output of various schools. We all know Williamson County Schools are good schools, we know we rank highly in the nation and we know we are blessed. It wasn’t about the schools. It was about much, much more than that.

Life changes no matter what we do. Our kids will inevitably learn that lesson with every new level of school, every new job and every new problem life will bring to them up front and center. What we are after is the creation of community and the string of intangible benefit that comes with it.

In a National Educators Association (NEA) policy brief on the importance of parent, family and community involvement in Education, the article notes researchers cite parent-family-community involvement as a key to addressing the school dropout crisis and that strong school-family-community partnerships foster higher educational aspirations and more motivated students.

Now I, along with everyone else involved, have stopped and we are thinking -- where do I go from here?  Is there interest in working toward a more proactive rezoning process?  Is there interest in better ways to keep from breaking up the established cultures and communities that surround schools?  Is there interest in the larger community to find other ways to hold the school board, central office and the county commission more fiscally responsible?

 I ask you, can we, the community, garner enough energy to stand up, dust ourselves off and find out if there is something more to be done? 

I certainly expect it from this great county. Stealing from a common phrase these days, “We are Williamson County,” right?.