Parents in the Mehlville School District got their first chance to look at redistricting scenarios last week, as the district released two plans online for public comment in advance of two public-feedback sessions scheduled later this month.
To see maps of redistricting boundaries, visit
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Mehlville’s first redistricting in 14 years is spurred by the stark disparities in class size around the district: In fourth grade, Bierbaum Elementary enrolled 112 students last year, while Hagemann Elementary enrolled 35.
Both redistricting scenarios presented to the public balance that current lopsided enrollment so that elementary students are more evenly spread across the district, with Hagemann gaining more than 120 students and Bierbaum losing 80.
Under each scenario, roughly 930 of the district’s 4,589 elementary students will move to a new school, while under the two middle school/high school scenarios, either 252 high school and 55 middle school students would move or 368 high schoolers and 120 middle schoolers.
“So you can look it as 900 elementary kids are moving, or you can look at it as 3,600 elementary kids aren’t moving,” Superintendent Chris Gaines said.
Parents can use an
to type in their address and see exactly what their change in boundaries is.
The district will hold two open houses with blown-up maps for public comment, from 6 to 7 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 27, at Washington Middle School and on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at Blades Elementary.
“There are going to be a whole bunch of people that go, ‘Oh my God, we’re moving,’ and there’s going to be some people who are like, ‘Oh my God, we’re not moving,’ and there’s going to be people who are like, ‘Our new attendance zone is where we’re going for school choice, so no big deal,’” Gaines said. “There’s going to be a range of emotion.”
After taking comments on the two scenarios, the committee will recommend one to the Board of Education, which is set to vote March 9 on redistricting.
The redistricting process is being led by assistant principals Kelly Roberts of Bierbaum and Whitney Maus of Point and Trautwein elementaries.
“We have schools that have turned closets into working spaces,” Roberts explained in a district video released alongside the scenarios. “We also have schools within our district that have room, this means they have smaller class sizes and classes that are empty. Redistricting will help our student populations at all schools by setting a comfortable capacity number.”
Although the school-choice deadline is March 1, Deputy Superintendent Brian Lane said he has always accepted applications past the due date. He typically makes decisions by mid-April, but could push that back this year due to redistricting, he said.
The initial boundary template was suggested by the district’s demographer, Preston Smith of Business Information Services LLC, and revised by the 32-member Redistricting Committee.
He also came up with capacity numbers for each school, and the committee set a goal to fill schools to roughly 85 percent of capacity so they have room to grow in future years. Besides balancing out classrooms, a key goal of redistricting is to fix Mehlville’s odd feeder patterns into both middle school and high school.
As the district released the video and maps, some parents redistricted from Mehlville High to Oakville High questioned why only incoming seniors will be automatically grandfathered into their current schools, while incoming juniors facing a move will have to apply for school choice.
Other students redistricted from Oakville to Mehlville around Butler Hill Road said they bought houses knowing that their neighborhood goes to OHS, not MHS. One parent mentioned a real-estate website that ranked MHS lower than OHS.
“Lower ratings based on what? Same curriculum, excellent teachers,” the district’s Facebook page responded.
Pointing to the strategic-plan dashboards on each high school’s website, Gaines noted that the latest posted scores to the dashboard show MHS with higher test scores than OHS.
To move students from Bierbaum to Hagemann, the shifting had to start at Rogers Elementary, which had to take in more students from the corridor along Telegraph Road to free up space at Point, which took in students from Wohlwend. To fill Wohlwend, its boundaries were extended north of Oakville Elementary, closer in some places to Bernard than Oakville Middle School, which is next door to Wohlwend.
OES, already packed, will lose children, while the boundaries of Trautwein and Blades change significantly to move children toward Hagemann. The panel had to leave room at OES for the predicted children from two nearby subdivisions, Gaines noted.
“Hagemann’s going to have a big impact because they’re gaining a slew of kids,” Gaines said. “Bierbaum’s losing a bunch of kids, OES’ll be losing a bunch of kids. But the reason that we started this in the beginning was that we had buildings like Bierbaum and OES that are pretty crowded, Point, and then you have Hagemann that’s sitting over there empty, not empty but almost. They’re more tightly packed than they are now.”
Class sizes will not spike, however, because the district will shift teachers from Bierbaum to Hagemann or wherever they’re needed, Gaines said. He previously told the board that redistricting will likely mean shifting students and teachers from MHS to OHS.
But he pointed out that kindergarteners at Bierbaum and other packed schools are sometimes bused to a different school as it is because the schools are too packed for their kindergarten classes.
The difference between scenarios can be broken down mainly based on feeder patterns, Maus explained in the video.
Currently, Blades Elementary students split between Bernard Middle and Washington Middle, and then some are split off again as some Bernard students go to Mehlville High and others to Oakville High. That results in some Oakville residents attending Mehlville High, and some Blades students being split off from their friends twice.
In the new system, for the most part, students living in Oakville will go to OHS and students living in the Mehlville half will go to MHS. The few exceptions are Beasley, which is split under one of the elementary scenarios, and Wohlwend, which is split under both scenarios.
Although Gaines said he had no preference in the elementary scenarios, in the long term for the high schools, he prefers Scenario A that is less strict on Oakville/Mehlville lines because under B, OHS is projected to have 500 more students than MHS, Gaines said.
“I look at scenario B and that creates a pretty big difference, but if I look at scenario A, that’s more balanced,” Gaines said.
