Endeavor middle school boundary proposal unveiled

MOSES LAKE - The service area for the new Endeavor Middle School will include all of the area adjacent to Patton Boulevard, and about 100 students will move from Frontier Middle School to Chief Moses Middle School. That will be the proposal submitted to the Moses Lake School Board at its March 27 meeting.

A map of the proposed boundaries was shown to a small crowd Monday night at the third and last meeting to gather community opinion on which neighborhoods should attend each middle school.

Board members voted in August to close Columbia Basin Secondary School and convert the building into a middle school. The school board chose the name Endeavor for the school in February.

All students in the Endeavor service area will live within five miles of the building, district transportation supervisor John Eschenbacher said. Eschenbacher was part of the team tasked to adjust the boundary.

The Endeavor boundary will include Gateway Estates, Harvest Manor and that part of Cascade Valley that is in the Larson Heights Elementary district, he said. Students that attend North Elementary but don't live on Patton will attend Chief Moses. The Endeavor boundary will stop at the Grant County International Airport.

Previously all the students assigned to the new middle school attended Chief Moses, Eschenbacher said. In order to balance the populations of the two existing middle schools, about 100 students will be moved from Frontier to Chief Moses, Eschenbacher said. That will require some redistricting in the area around Longview Elementary, he said.

The proposal would mean about 872 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders at Chief Moses, about 674 students at Frontier and about 303 students at Endeavor. About 87 percent of Endeavor's students would qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The free/reduced percentage at Frontier is about 68 percent, and 65 percent at Chief Moses. When asked about that, Eschenbacher said alternative boundaries reduced the difference by a maximum of about 5 percent.

One of the proposals would have split the area around Patton Boulevard at the boundary between North and Larson Heights. Dave Balcom, the district's director of business and operations, said the boundary committee did look at that. But there's a lot of movement among families along Patton, with kids moving frequently from North to Larson Heights. District officials thought that kind of movement would be more of a problem when it came to middle school, he said.

Endeavor will have a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) focus in electives, Balcom said; its core curriculum will be the same as the two existing middle schools. It will have an AVID program, which is designed to help kids get ready for post-secondary education, he said, even if they haven't thought about college or trade school previously.

The district has a Choice program, where parents can apply to transfer their children to a school outside their neighborhood. Parents can apply between April 15 and May 15, district superintendent Michelle Price said. District officials already have received inquiries about transferring to Endeavor, due to its STEM focus, Price said.

District policy is to allow parents to transfer students if there's room available at the other school. Parents apply for transfer between April 15 and May 15.

Applications are available at each school building, but not on the district's website, Price said. Applications must be returned to the child's neighborhood school by the deadline.

If there's room for some but not all of the kids who apply for a given school, students are chosen on the basis of a lottery, according to district policies.

Children who are attending the school already or who have siblings at the school are given priority, according to the policy.