BoundarEase: Fostering Constructive Community Engagement to Inform More Equitable Student Assignment Policies
Author(s)
Overney, Cassandra
Moe, Cassandra
Chang, Alvin
Gillani, Nabeel
Date Issued
May 2, 2025
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Cassandra Overney, Cassandra Moe, Alvin Chang, and Nabeel Gillani. 2025. BoundarEase: Fostering Constructive Community Engagement to Inform More Equitable Student Assignment Policies. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 2, Article CSCW040 (May 2025), 37 pages.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
Description
Cassandra Overney, Cassandra Moe, Alvin Chang, and Nabeel Gillani. 2025. BoundarEase: Fostering Constructive Community Engagement to Inform More Equitable Student Assignment Policies. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 2, Article CSCW040 (May 2025), 37 pages.
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3710938
