These Lowell kids are probably already driving and working on Wall Street but we’re sure the alumni are proud their school’s boundaries are now even more expansive (Image: CHS)

Capitol Hill’s Stevens Elementary is losing its Central District students while Lowell Elementary continues its expansion through Belltown and the ID under school growth boundaries approved Wednesday night in a marathon school board meeting that numbed even the hardiest of parental and media posteriors.

The Seattle School Board unanimously approved the plan (PDF) during the meeting that lasted a whopping seven hours. The vote comes after months of wrangling between school officials and parents on the future enrollment boundaries for neighborhood schools and is to be part of an annual process of adjustments, the board decided Wednesday night.

The school board also solidified plans to shift students into the new Meany Middle School in 2017 (PDF) and move the World School, currently on the Meany campus, to T.T. Minor (PDF). Students from Stevens and Lowell would join those from Madrona (K-8), McGilvra, and Montlake in Capitol Hill’s Meany campus when its $14.2 million overhaul is complete in 2017. Currently, students from those schools all feed into Washington Middle School in the Central District. Do you have children living on Capitol Hill? No? You are saint for reading this far.

In October, a group of Stevens parents voiced strong opposition to initial border changes, arguing the reconfiguration would decrease diversity in the school by slicing out families who lived in the southern reaches of the boundary between Madison and Cherry. In early November the schools released an updated plan that looked much like the school’s original boundaries. Wednesday night’s final decision pushed the cut through, however, lopping off potential Stevens families below Madison.

In addition to the boundaries vote, the school board also voted on changes to Central District middle school feeder patterns and to keep World School housed at T.T. Minor

The move to “neighborhood schools” and an increased emphasis on walkability and location of students combined with a surging population of children in the city has Seattle schools officials scrambling to adjust boundaries without whipsawing some families from school to school. Overcrowding for the youngest students at Stevens this year had the school considering adding a portable classroom at one point. That didn’t happen but at the beginning of this school year, Stevens’s three kindergarten classes were all over-enrolled.

The final decisions will not please one group of parents in the Central District who had pushed for the re-opening of 18th and Union’s TT Minor as an elementary school. In a process of what will now be near-constant adjustment, those parents have plenty of company in other parts of Seattle if mainstream media coverage is to be believed. Meanwhile, the Stevens parents happy after pushing back on boundary changes for the school probably won’t show up in any TV reports.   — Well, hell — they’re probably pissed now, too! The new maps for Lowell and Stevens are below.