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Bound to frustrate

Think you bought into a coveted school track? Think again, especially in high-growth areas like New Tampa.

By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK
Published July 28, 2006

Dionne and Craig Hammond wanted nothing more than a stable, involved community life when they moved their family to Tampa four years ago.

It would serve their ministry at Wellspring United Methodist Church well, and it would offer their three children respite from what had become frequent moves from church to church, town to town. The couple promised Caily, Lydia and Connor that they would settle here in Westchase: no more uprooting from friends, school or home.

Then the politics of school construction funding, crowding and attendance boundaries reared its ugly head. Without warning, the Hammond family - along with hundreds of neighbors throughout western Hillsborough - found themselves threatened with the destabilization they had sought to avoid.

Seeking to maximize its resources before asking for more money to build new schools, the School Board decided to balance enrollments between campuses with too many kids and those with too few. The county's western corridor, which had some of the county's most crowded elementary schools, came up for realignment first.

More changes could be announced as early as December. New Tampa, which has schools over 120 percent of capacity and under 80 percent of capacity, likely will see some proposed boundary readjustments in the next round.

To school officials, the new student assignments make sense for efficiency. But for families, it's just a source of angst and dismay. Many bought their houses, or rented in certain neighborhoods, specifically for the schools.

"For us to be staying in the same house and for the children to be moving schools was kind of ironic," Dionne Hammond said of her younger children's rezoning from Westchase to Lowry elementary school. "Now everyone is questioning if this could happen again."

It's not just parents who choose homes based on school assignment. It's also the people who simply like the value that a well-respected school adds to their home, regardless of whether they have children. The link between high-performing schools and hotly pursued neighborhoods is undeniable.

Yet recent events show there are no guarantees that you can keep the situation you buy into forever - especially in high-growth communities where children flow in faster than schools get built.

"It's sad, because these people paid top dollar, and part of the reason ... especially those with elementary school kids, was to have their kids right there at the closest neighborhood school," said Tony Rojas, a Re/Max broker who works in the Westchase welcome center.

Several school officials suggest that the blame, at least in part, for assumptions about school assignments lies at the feet of real estate agents and subdivision developers. It doesn't seem much of a stretch.

Loads of "house for sale" ads prominently list the schools that the neighborhood is assigned to. Web sites for popular communities, including Meadow Pointe, Countryway and Westchase, feature news about and links to the highly rated schools where area children attend.

Steve Ayers, who designs attendance zones for the school district, said he tries to make sure that real estate brokers understand how the boundaries work. He's also working to eliminate the term "neighborhood schools" from the district vocabulary.

"It's an attendance area school," Ayers said. "It steps back from, 'It's my neighborhood, it's my school.' "

He hesitates, though, to press the home selling world too far to join in the cause. He can't keep in touch with all of them, after all. That would consume all his time.

Folks who sell real estate know the accusation well. Many do talk freely about school assignments in an attempt to move a house. That's what full-service brokers do: get answers to the questions that potential buyers have.

A growing number, though, have come to see that Hillsborough County's school system is in such flux that it's more prudent not to answer.

"Our counsel to buyers would be that these things are subject to change," said Doug Loyd, owner of Florida Executive Realty, which has four Tampa area offices. "The people in Westchase got that message, probably more painfully than they would have liked."

Colleen Causey, a Realtor for Keller Williams, refers potential buyers and their agents to the school district when asked about schools.

"I say, 'You know what? I cannot and will not answer any questions about schools,' " Causey said. "I am not an expert. I am not going to put myself in a liability situation where if I give you wrong information it's going to come back on me."

She pointed to a potential example of a home sale in the Mandolin subdivision of Citrus Park.

Until recently, the school district had assigned the community to Mary Bryant Elementary School. Now, its children will attend Deer Park Elementary, which will operate in portables on the Citrus Park Elementary campus until a new school is complete.

A buyer "might say, 'I never would have bought this home if I had known my child was going to go to a broken-down portable at Citrus Park,' " Causey said. "I don't put school information in there if I can avoid it."

Sometimes an attendance boundary won't change for years, if at all. That's most probable when the zone is small and the communities are densely populated.

But when regions are growing, as is the case throughout northern Hillsborough, the chances that your school attendance zone might change also increase.

"If development comes in, a school boundary constricts until it reaches its critical mass," said Ayers, the school boundaries guru. "People on the edges of the community get mad because it was their community school, and they don't want to move."

That's how the Hammonds felt. Westchase Elementary served as a focus for the surrounding neighborhoods, and "if we were out of that loop, we were out of the bigger things going on."

So they moved about a mile from their previous home, just to stick with the school.

"We had been talking about moving," Dionne Hammond said. "This just made us do it."

Jeffrey S. Solochek can be reached at 813 269-5304 or solochek@sptimes.com.

[Last modified July 28, 2006, 06:29:05]