By Bill Forry

What may be the first official attempt at reforming the way kids are assigned to public schools in Boston began to take some form this week on Court Street, headquarters of the ofteb mysterious Boston School Department. On Wednesday night (after the Reporter and all other neighborhood papers went to press for the week) the power-that-be on Court Street held a press conference to announce a new "task force" that - according to school officials - will result in a proposed new assignment policy by May 2004.

Details are murky, but the broad strokes of the task force's mission are potentially daunting. In five months, the group is charged with analyzing the current assignment plan, then coming up with two new preliminary models to take before public meetings across the neighborhoods.

According to a preview of the review process provided by the school department, there is no "preconceived model" for a new policy on the table yet, a deliberate move aimed at getting the community to "buy in" to a review process. It will begin in January with a series of forums to discuss "parents' experiences of the student assignment system as it exists now." Another round of forums will "review any modifications to the plan proposed by the task force."

All that leads up to the submission of a proposed plan to go before the school committee before school ends for the summer. School department officials state up front that one option for the task force is to recommend no changes, something City Hall observers view as highly unlikely. Any changes that do get approved would not be implemented until September 2005.

Depending on whom you ask, this may or may not portend an end to "busing" as we know it in Boston. Throughout the 1990s, "neighborhood schools" has been the mantra of many an aspiring politician. And, in drips and drabs, change has come.

In 1990, the city shifted to the three-zone model that parents know - and often hate - today. In 1999, the school department officially dropped race as a criterion in assignment thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Dorchester-based advocacy group Boston's Children First. Still, the city spends roughly $55 million each year to bus students across the neighborhoods, a budget-buster that critics say is wasted at the expense of teachers and new facilities.

Today, school policy reserves half of the seats at specific schools for "walk-to" students. The rest are supposed to be filled through lottery by kids from other parts of the city.

Ann Walsh, the woman who started Boston's Children First from her home in Ashmont-Adams and has been a leading thinker on school reform locally, doubts that any real change will come from the school department in this effort. Walsh has been shopping her own proposed assignment reform to city councillors and other leaders for the past two years, with some promising reactions, she says. Walsh calls on the city to go from having three assignment zones to 22, essentially mirroring the existing neighborhoods as we know them.

"There's nothing about the plan that isn't the purest, simplest geography," says Walsh. Yet even Walsh, the city's most outspoken neighborhood school proponent, is clear that no matter what happens with a new assignment plan, buses will always roll on city streets.

"There always will be and should be busing," says Walsh. "You may have buses that run the circumference of the neighborhood clusters, because some of the kids live at boundaries too far from the schools."

It's unlikely that Walsh's plan is even remotely near the table in Tom Payzant's office. It's not even clear yet who will serve on the Task Force - the school department would not reveal this state secret to the Reporter - although it's clear that Walsh will not be among them.

More plausible is City Councillor Maura Hennigan's notion that the city will continue to "phase in" neighborhood school options immediately, while they construct a more massive overhaul over a much longer period. According to Hennigan, if the school department and the rest of the Menino administration did have something more ambitious in mind, they have not invested enough in new schools to make it happen.

"People keep talking about neighborhood schools, but you don't have schools in every neighborhood," Hennigan says. "Last year the School Committee turned down an opportunity for Beacon Hill to have its own school. If this had been their plan, they've missed too many opportunities. You can't build enough schools in every neighborhood. We're going to have to look at the existing facilities with new eyes."

Such creativity has been shown to work at places like the Richard J. Murphy school in Neponset, where parents and faculty teamed up in 2001 to convert the former elementary school into one of the city's few K-8 schools. But not all schools will be able to accommodate such expansions, which is why Hennigan believes that the only feasible route is a dual-track approach that begins to change assignments in neighborhoods that can accommodate such reforms.

I think we have to have an interim plan and a long term plan," Hennigan says. "I don't think you should penalize neighborhoods that could take advantage of existing facilities. And most of our neighborhoods are integrated and do reflect the diversity of the city. Let's not hold up everyone."

The first public meeting of the school assignment task force is set for Saturday, January 10 at an undetermined "central location," according to the Boston Public Schools.