First published in the Nov. 20 print issue of the Glendale News Press.
The Glendale Unified School District approved its redistricting map this week, making a pair of light shifts to help bring its five trustee areas into population and demographic compliance.
To balance populations, school board members agreed to shift around 16 blocks of District C to District B and nine from District E to District D. Prior boundaries otherwise remain in place, and the geometric effect is to make the affected districts more compact.
“I think that’s the least amount of change and will bring the least amount of confusion to voters,” board member Armina Gharpetian said Tuesday, prior to the board’s vote.
Under this new map, starting populations for the five areas will be 45,589 residents in District A; 44,035 in District B; 42,722 in District C; 42,712 in District D; and 44,555 in District E. Following the results of the 2020 U.S. Census, these political districts were to have approximately 44,000 residents each, with some permitted variation.
The decision Tuesday marks the first redistricting for GUSD, as it transitioned in 2017 from an at-large to a trustee system. Voters approved the initial district maps, and school board members were keen on preserving those lines as much as possible when accounting for the population changes this year.
“These are staying as close to the boundaries of what the voters did choose essentially when we initially did districting,” board member Jennifer Freemon said Tuesday.
GUSD’s political boundaries extend outside of Glendale city limits to include unincorporated La Crescenta-Montrose, along with an incorporated portion of La Cañada Flintridge commonly referred to as Sagebrush. As a result, its base population is 219,613, while the city of Glendale has a population of around 196,500 residents.
The school board voted unanimously to approve the new maps on Tuesday.
