Karen Montano learned about a new South Portland school redistricting plan when she couldn’t register her daughter for kindergarten at Dyer Elementary School, where her two older children had attended.

That’s an unfortunate way for a parent to hear about a significant change for her children, and it appears Montano’s not alone. A large crowd of parents complained Monday night at a School Board meeting about poor communication from the school department over a redistricting plan that could send nearly 200 kids to different schools in South Portland next year. Many of those parents have called on the school department and School Board to remove the redistricting plan from this year’s budget so that parents have enough time to consider the changes.

School officials should comply with the wishes of parents. Clearly, many parents did not know about the redistricting plan. With the budget headed for a vote on March 10, parents have little time to consider the changes and convey their concerns to school officials.

School officials are already facing one of their toughest budgets in years. They learned just this week that a $600,000 reduction in state aid might actually become a $1.1 million cut – the equivalent of 16.2 staff positions. Coming up with a final budget to send to the City Council will be difficult enough, without weighing the process down with a complicated and controversial redistricting plan.

The schools’ Redistricting Advisory Committee has been meeting since early January. The minutes of their meetings, along with the full redistricting plan, are posted on the school department’s Web site, www.spsd.org. However, most parents didn’t learn about the changes until recent days.

Parents complained that the schools didn’t send home any notification of the redistricting. They also complained that because the school redistricting discussions have taken place as a part of the budget discussions, what was happening wasn’t clear.

Miscommunications like these are not uncommon in local government. Committees, boards and councils often do their planning in public, but with few people watching. Most parents lead busy lives and aren’t engaged in the week-to-week planning and budgeting for the school department. They get involved when they find out something might affect their kids.

Moving to a new school is no small matter for kids or for parents, even if it is absolutely necessary for the overall operation of the school department. That’s why sending notification home in this case would have been best.

That’s particularly true because the timeline for approving this plan seems so compressed. The plan was just presented to the full school board last Thursday. By the time parents heard about it and spoke out at a School Board meeting, it was a week away from approval as a part of $42.7 million budget. Parents who packed the library at Memorial Middle School Monday night had to sit through nearly two hours of budget deliberations before they got an opportunity to be heard on the subject they came to talk about – redistricting.

Parents want to feel as though school officials are interested in hearing their concerns. To reassure them of that, school officials should remove the redistricting plan from the budget for separate consideration, send notices home to parents who would be affected and allow them ample time to consider the changes before being heard.

Brendan Moran, editor