BoundarEase: Fostering Constructive Community Engagement to Inform More Equitable Student Assignment Policies

Public school districts across the United States (US) play a pivotal role in shaping access to quality education through their student assignment policies---most prominently, school attendance boundaries. Community engagement processes for changing such policies, however, are often opaque, cumbersome, and highly polarizing---hampering equitable access to quality schools in ways that can perpetuate disparities in achievement and future life outcomes. In this paper, we describe a collaboration with a large US public school district serving nearly 150,000 students to design and evaluate a new sociotechnical system, ``BoundarEase'', for fostering more constructive community engagement around changing school attendance boundaries. Through a formative study with 16 community members, we first identify several frictions in existing community engagement processes during boundary planning, like individualistic over collective thinking; a failure to understand and empathize with different community members when considering policy impacts; and challenges in accessing and understanding the impacts of boundary changes. We then use these frictions to inspire the design and development of BoundarEase, a web platform that allows community members to explore and offer feedback on potential boundaries based on their preferences. A user study with 12 community members reveals that BoundarEase prompts reflection among community members on how policies might impact families beyond their own, and increases transparency around the details of policy proposals. Our paper offers education researchers insights into the challenges and opportunities involved in community engagement for designing student assignment policies; human-computer interaction researchers a case study of how new sociotechnical systems might help mitigate polarization in local policymaking; and school districts a practical tool they might use to facilitate community engagement to foster more equitable student assignment policies.