The word suggests geography. The dictionary speaks of lines.

But with children and schools involved that’s the least of it. Boundaries choices offer opportunities for educational innovations. And stress for families.

We all know about moving. The apartment that’s plenty big for a young couple seems cramped once the twins need their own rooms.

That’s what happens to elementary schools. More children than we planned or built for.

Knowing that doesn’t make the solutions any easier.

Ideally each child would be in one school kindergarten through sixth grade. With their siblings.

My sister and I were each in the university school (now North Hall) for 13 years.

Moving can be upsetting academically as well as emotionally. Our schools have different educational philosophies as well as locations.

Boundary changes can split up siblings. Be an imposition on parents. Require longer school bus rides. Inconvenience teachers.

They are politically disruptive for a community, its school board, and superintendent.

Board members, administrators and Dr. Lane Plugge’s boundaries committee members know this. Some of us intuitively, others, like Dale Shultz, from personal experience. We don’t need more convincing.

The board’s looking for parameters that reflect community values – and the best educational research. We need to know from you how much innovation in elementary education you’re prepared to support.

We need to know if you want to fully integrate, or forcefully isolate, our district’s international, special education, and low income students.

Ironically, the less the community is willing to innovate the greater will be the pain from the changes we will have to make.

And the more we limit the impact on families this year, the greater will be the repeated impact from changes in the years after that.

The causes, cures and options are almost limitless.

Imagine you are given the task of planning United Airlines’ routes. Hundreds of planes, thousands of passengers, 130 cities, 90,000 employees – and no way of controlling how many passengers will show up any given day. Now maximize profits.

That’s kind of what we’re about to do.

United uses computers to solve the equation. There may be comparable tools for us. Our 10,500 students sounds like a lot. And they are. But it’s not millions of passenger miles. We could code the data by child, create alternative variables, and run “what if” scenarios with named individuals.

The district’s demographics consultant, Gerard Rushton, already does some of this.

We’ve brought “overcrowding” on ourselves. There’s no shortage of schools, just classrooms. We have about 5,000 elementary students. Put them 50 to a room?

We’d only need 100 classrooms. No overcrowding. No redistricting necessary.

But we want smaller class sizes. Certainly not 50. Maybe 25? We’d need 200 classrooms. Twice as many.  Class size of 17? Find 294 rooms. You get the idea. It’s a variable – with redistricting consequences.

Many programs and activities that use elementary schools’ space didn’t exist 50 years ago. Like all-day kindergarten. Eliminate them and we eliminate overcrowding. But we don’t want that either.

There are other options. Some are being used up the road in Cedar Rapids and throughout the nation’s 15,000 school districts. They work.

No one likes change. Each of these innovations is universally and strenuously opposed by those who’ve never tried it. And enthusiastically embraced by those who have.

• Put sixth graders in a middle school, and the population in the elementary schools decreases by one-seventh.

• Age grouping. Limit a school by age. A kindergarten school. Another first through third grade. Every principal and parent I’ve talked to opposes the idea. But we haven’t tried it.

• Magnet schools. They have a full, well-rounded curriculum. But they emphasize an area – like music, or science. Parental choice. More children in otherwise underutilized buildings.

• Year-round schools. Our “overcrowded” schools stand empty all but 180 days a year. Not many kids in our district are needed as child labor in their parents’ cornfields next summer. And many suffer a real academic setback during the hiatus. Perhaps we should revisit the academic calendar at least every 100 years.

But there may be a point to having some long-range vision of where we’d like to be, say, 10 years from now. Not just buildings and boundaries. Sound educational innovations. Otherwise the likelihood of repeated, and even more disruptive, quick fixes seems inevitable.

Nicholas Johnson is a member of the Iowa City School Board.