Sioux Falls School District exploring school boundary changes

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) - The Sioux Falls School District last made changes to its school boundaries when it opened Jefferson High School and Ben Reifel Middle School in August of 2021. But continued growth in the city and students continuing to open enroll in the district means some schools are at capacity, and more changes need to be made.

Rapid growth on both the east and west sides of the city is putting a strain on the city’s elementary schools, especially Rosa Parks and Renberg Elementary Schools. Those two schools would see the most changes in the proposed boundary adjustments.

For Rosa Parks, students east of Highway 11 and south of 33rd Street, and west of Highway 11 and south of 41st Street would move to Harvey Dunn Elementary. Students in the bus area west of Cleveland Avenue would move to Susan B. Anthony Elementary. Finally, the most northern square area of the current Rosa Parks Elementary boundary north of Arrowhead Parkway would move to Anne Sullivan.

For Renberg, the southeast corner of the current boundary area would move to Hawthorne Elementary. A full list of the proposed changes can be found here.

Those two schools are over capacity at the moment and will only continue to grow into next year. District Assistant Superintendent Jamie Nold said the growing number of students is a good sign for the future, but overcapacity schools are growing pains they need to overcome.

“It’s a good problem to have, to have more children and more students attending our schools. We just need to make sure we don’t come to the fall and not have a place to put them,” Nold said. “We’ve taken rooms that aren’t necessarily classrooms and made them into classrooms at this point in time. So we’re trying to relieve some of that. We have a plan. It’s just that some of these buildings and apartments are going up faster than we thought.”

Nold said overcapacity schools are much more difficult to deal with in elementary schools than in middle or high schools. The district will need to make changes again when it finishes building another elementary school on the west side of the district, but the current boundaries won’t work until then.

“You really either have to have space, or you don’t and you overcrowd the classrooms, and we really don’t want to have that happen as well. We want it set up so that every student has the opportunity to be in the right size class and to be able to go through and earn their education that way. But we just get into a situation where there’s such growth,” Nold said.

Nold said these changes aren’t meant to move around students from school to school unnecessarily. But to make sure they have room for everyone, they need to make changes.

“We don’t want families to have to move. But we also have to make sure that we account for the space that we have available. It’d be worse yet when we come to the fall and we haven’t planned for that, and make sure that we have that space available so that every student that shows up there in the fall has a place to be,” Nold said.

Three more public input sessions will be held before the school board gives its final approval. Nold said they want to hear from as many families, parents, and community members as possible to try and find ways to make changes as easy for everyone as they can. He said their first discussion, held on February 7, was constructive in offering community feedback and positive changes. Each will be held at Rosa Parks Elementary, and each session will focus on the boundary changes for each specific school.

Rosa Parks/BRMS to Anne Sullivan/WMS

- Location: Rosa Parks Elementary School

- Date: February 13, 2022

- Time: 7 p.m.

- Room: Rosa Parks Elementary School Library

Rosa Parks to Harvey Dunn

- Location: Rosa Parks Elementary School

- Date: February 22, 2022

- Time: 5:30 p.m.

- Room: Rosa Parks Elementary School Library

Rosa Parks/BRMS/WHS to SBA/PHMS/LHS

- Location: Rosa Parks Elementary School

- Date: February 22, 2022

- Time: 6:30 p.m.

- Room: Rosa Parks Elementary School Library

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