BAKERSFIELD. CALIF. (KERO) — The fate of official boundary changes due to the new Del Oro High School in Southwest Bakersfield is about a month away, as board members and parents expressed the weight of the decision during the meeting Monday tonight.
September 7 is when the Kern High School District will officially decide which boundary-changing plan they’ll go with. J. Bryan Batey calling these boundary changes one of the most controversial moves in the last 40 years.
Three plans hang in the balance and after three public forums over the proposed boundary changes in the Kern High School District, multiple people with ties to Bakersfield High School urge the board to vote for plan three. One of them, Laura Oesech brought with her a petition she said has about 200 signatures.
“In our neighborhood over 40 years of families going to BHS. My house when it was built has always been zones for BHS, we thought when we bought it, we thought we’d be able to go there with our family," said Oesech during public comment.
Of the three plans, KHSD’s director of research and planning Roger Sanchez presented, plan three will shuffle around the least amount of BHS students. It would move 265, versus 425 in plan two and 586 in plan one. It would also move the least amount of the 40,000 students in the district overall. The ones being moved are 9th and 10th graders.
“If you’re living in Arvin, Golden Valley, South, and Mira Monte, and you’re in that transition area, in the year 22 you’ll move 9th and 10th graders at the same time," said Sanchez. "If you are in one of these schools and the transition area, then we’re looking at only incoming 9th graders. So we’ll grandfather those students in every year after that.”
Sanchez also said plans one and two would move 19 areas while plan three would move 22.
Plan one would save the district 10s of thousands of dollars on transportation costs like busing annually compared to the other two plans.
