The Boulder Valley school board heard an update at a Tuesday worksession on the district’s planned review of school attendance area boundaries, with the board asking for a regional approach.

Potential areas to review include attendance boundaries with disconnected, non-contiguous areas; dual enrollment areas; and split elementary-to-middle school feeder systems. Elementary school attendance areas with fewer than 300 resident students also could be considered.

About a year ago, the school board updated three enrollment-related policies, including adding a policy requirement to review attendance boundaries every five years. It’s been more than 40 years since the district has undertaken a comprehensive review of its attendance areas.

Evaluating enrollment-related policies was one of several recommendations made by the Long Range Advisory Committee, which was tasked with developing guidelines for how to handle shrinking elementary schools as the district grapples with overall declining enrollment.

Superintendent Rob Anderson described attendance boundaries, coupled with family open enrollment decisions, as a “massively complicated ecosystem.”

“We don’t know what happens when we change attendance boundaries, because we’ve never done it,” he said.

Attendance areas matter because students are guaranteed a spot at their assigned neighborhood school, as well as generally provided transportation if they live a certain distance away. But, because of declining enrollment, Boulder Valley families generally are receiving their first choice when open enrolling to another school, with some exceptions for specific charter schools and “focus” schools.

Information provided to the school board on Tuesday included sharing the five elementary schools with the smallest resident student populations in their attendance boundaries: Douglass and Flatirons in Boulder, Kohl in Broomfield, Monarch in Louisville and Eldorado in Superior. The last two serve students through eighth grade as K-8 schools.

While those schools have fewer than 300 resident students in their attendance areas, other schools have more resident students than would fit in their buildings — but enough students open-enroll to other schools that it’s not an issue.

Along with looking at enrollment impacts, the district is considering cleaning up boundary irregularities.

Creekside, Columbine and Whittier Elementary, all in Boulder, have non-contiguous attendance areas.

At Whittier, 113 students assigned to attend Whittier live in two mobile home parks that are inside Columbine Elementary’s boundary. At Creekside, six students who are slated to attend Creekside live in University of Colorado Boulder graduate student housing that’s inside Whittier’s boundary.

Boulder’s Bear Creek Elementary also shares enrollment areas with two other south Boulder elementary schools, Creekside and Mesa. Students in those areas can pick which school they would like to attend as their home school. Bear Creek and Creekside share 35 resident students, while Bear Creek and Mesa share 143 resident students.

The district’s other overlapping enrollment area is between Boulder and Fairview high schools, which share 257 resident students who live in Gunbarrel.

Anderson noted one option could be to replace dual attendance areas with a single attendance area, but give affected families an open enrollment preference so they could continue to attend their desired school.

“It is all interconnected,” he said.

Another boundary issue that mainly applies to Boulder schools is sending students from a single elementary school to different middle schools based on their neighborhood, potentially splitting friend groups and contributing to open enrollment so friends can stay together. Creekside Elementary students, for example, are slated to attend three different middle schools, depending on their home address.

“We can better align some of these to have that sense of community,” school board President Nicole Rajpal said.

The school board plans to continue the attendance boundary discussion in March, after receiving updated open enrollment statistics and enrollment trend data in February.

Along with looking at additional data, board members said, they want to consider reviewing attendance boundaries based on regions, such as south Boulder, instead of looking at adjusting an individual school boundary.

“It will be a little easier for us to make sense of it,” school board member Alex Medler said.