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OrderSome schools admit more students than the educational resources can hold, which later on forces the administration to transfer some of the students to other schools. Transfer of students between schools will affect the students, school, their families, and community as a whole. The effects include crossing cultural and economic boundaries, increased travel time, reduced quality of education, change of property value, and social problems among children. In Miami School District, it is necessary to redraw school boundaries to address the problem of student overpopulation. Experts should review and redraw the boundaries to reduce the population of students in the subsequent years. Redrawing of school boundaries will affect various stakeholders who will experience a number of concerns in return. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the stakeholders and the concerns they may be experiencing before establishing them. Choosing the negotiation strategy and reviewing the effects of culture and ethics will ensure the applicability of the negotiation technique for the current circumstances. This discussion will consider the identification of stakeholders, appropriate negotiation strategy for the need of the board to redraw the school boundaries, and how ethics and culture will affect the strategy.
Stakeholders
An efficient and effective negotiation strategy will take place after the identification of the stakeholders and concerns they will be experiencing. Stakeholders of the Miami School District are those individuals who will experience effects of the redrawing. They include the students, teachers, school staff, parents, and the community as a whole. The primary stakeholders are the students because they will encounter a number of changes such as new teachers, classmates, and campus environment. The stakeholders will experience a number of problems including crossing cultural and economic boundaries, increased travel time and expenditure, reduced quality of education, change of property value, and social problems among children.
Negotiation Strategy
The school board should employ integrative negotiation strategies as the most effective negotiation tactics, which will support the need of redrawing school boundaries while focusing on the stakeholders’ concerns. These strategies include collaborative communications, which build healthful relationships between the school board and stakeholders. Therefore, negotiation between the parents and Miami school district will help bring about win-win solutions because the communications are not contentious, but collaborative. Mutual exploration and discussion will ensure that both parents and the Miami school district raise their viewpoints regarding the redrawing of school boundaries.
An effective negotiation must follow a strategic plan with a number of steps.
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Write My PaperThe first step involves the acknowledgement that there is a conflict existing between the affected stakeholders and the Miami School District regarding the proposed change. Knowing and comprehending the source of the conflict will enable the school board to conduct meaningful negotiations, which will provide appropriate resolutions for the involved parties. When the school board has understood the sources of the conflict and prepared many possible resolutions, it will come together with the other parties and discuss the conflict, which will take place in the subsequent steps.
In the second step, the school board has to create negotiation meetings to address various questions or conflicts that the affected stakeholders have, regarding the redrawing of the Miami school district boundaries. The school board should remember to inform the stakeholders about all the advantages that will follow the rezoning of boundaries. They should also ensure that the stakeholders understand the care and professionalism involved to institute change. Therefore, the school board should make thorough preparations regarding the negotiation, which will take place in the third step.
The third step includes gathering enough information that will provide the stakeholders with enough evidence regarding the appropriateness of the school board’s decision. This information should reassure the community and other stakeholders that they looked into various alternatives and that redrawing of the boundaries was the best solution ever. It is necessary for the school board to be aware of the consequences when the district extends the time of redrawing boundaries, which include insufficient teaching staff, inadequate learning materials, insufficient funding, just to mention a few. Once all information is available, the board will put it open to the stakeholders during the fourth step.
In the fourth step, both parties will meet and discuss possible issues and reasons due to redrawing of school boundaries. This is the time when the school board should provide the stakeholders with enough facts and data to support redrawing of the boundaries as the best resolution to address overpopulation in schools. In addition, the board should assure the affected stakeholders that the change will lead to the benefit of all. However, the school board should allow the stakeholders to raise their issues and possible alternatives.
The fifth step involves the opportunity of the stakeholders to express their ideas regarding the situation. It is during this step when the school board gathers information from the community. This information will help the school board to alter their proposed resolution to meet the stakeholders’ needs. The negotiation will result to a win-win solution because both parties contribute to providing possible problems and solutions. Therefore, both parties will come to a healthful agreement, which will bring about a successful change. Some of the areas that will serve as a basis for negotiation include crossing cultural and economic boundaries, increased travel time and expenditure, reduced quality of education, change of property value, and social problems among children.
Cultural and Economic Boundaries
Students and parents may experience cultural and economic issues following the transfer of students to new schools. It is the responsibility of the school board to understand the cultural and economic differences existing among the stakeholders of Miami School District. Some parents may not wish their children to interact with other children from different cultures and economic classes. However, some stakeholders, especially parents, consider this as a disapproving factor due to crimes and various issues that have a close relationship with ethical stereotypes. The school board should remind parents that their children can do extremely well when they interact with other children from different cultural backgrounds.
Social problems among children
Students will experience problems with socialization for a couple of days due to lack of familiarity. This will be detrimental to student relationships because of the sudden changes in the school environment. Different schools may not share culture, values, and ethics, which depend on the cultural backgrounds of students, teachers and other stakeholders. The change of environment will also affect parents because they will keep comforting their children to get accustomed to the new environment. Therefore, some parents may be against the transfer of their children to new schools. However, the new environment will be familiar to the students at long run.
Travel time and expenditure
When the new school is extremely far from the student’s place of residence, the student will require many hours and sizable pocket money for bus fare. In such a case, parents must provide their children with more pocket money and school fees than it was the case before the transfer. Additional pocket money will cater for fare, meals, and medication. Spending many hours in travelling will affect work schedules, after-school activities, and extracurricular activities. Increased monetary expenditure and travel time will also affect teachers whose places of residence are far from the new school. Therefore, students and teachers from distant places will experience long school days. However, with determination of teachers and students, long school days may not affect performance negatively. The school board should take the responsibility of comforting parents, teachers, and students into understanding that the extended travel time will improve the physical health, which will improve academic performance in return.
Reduced quality of education
Redrawing of school boundaries will raise the concern of the quality of education that schools will offer. Studies show that most of the schools whose students perform well academically tend to be overcrowded because they attract many students. Therefore, the transfer of students from their schools to new schools will affect parents because they desire to take their children to schools of their own choice. This will be an interruption to the intentions of parents for initially taking their children to some schools. The transfer of students will also affect teachers because they will lose their best students to new schools. The school board is responsible to ensure parents and students that the redrawing of school boundaries will have a number of benefits. Redrawing of school boundaries will encourage the interactions of students from different backgrounds, which will improve academic performance of students.
Change of property value
The redistricting of the school district may lead to a change of property values. For instance, the taxes of properties will reduce significantly as the economically rich people migrate from their homes. The community may experience a decline of resources because the economically active parents may migrate out of the district following the transfer of their children. The school district is responsible to make it clear to the community that it considers schools to be the first priority before choosing real property.
Ethics and Culture
It is necessary for the Miami school district to consider the cultural and ethical issues that surround the new boundaries. However, negotiators should serve as agents for suspending people’s ethical and personal standards and informing them that interaction of students from different backgrounds betters their academic performance. In the course of negotiation, the decisions regarding economic and cultural boundaries and their influence on the students can seem to be unethical if the negotiators do not handle them properly. The school board should persistently focus on the objectives concerning redrawing the school boundaries without going against the ethical structuring.
The school district should remember that the purpose of redrawing the school district boundaries is the unsustainable number of students in schools within the districts. Therefore, the aim of the changes is to provide students with high quality education because their numbers in different schools will be sustainable. The school board is responsible to helping students and other stakeholders understand the positive influence of diverse schools on the academic performance of students. The students should recognize the opportunity to learn from other students. Schools with students and teachers from diverse backgrounds have a likelihood of performing extremely well in a number of areas, including academics, extracurricular activities, just to mention a few. Students and teachers will acquire useful values from different cultures, which will encourage cultural cohesion. Thus, the school district should ensure that negotiations will produce effective resolutions, which will accommodate most of the stakeholders. However, it is necessary for the school board to understand that it might not be possible to make every person satisfied with the ultimate decisions following negotiation.
Therefore, integrative negotiation technique is the best alternative to ensure the achievement of objectives to redistrict the Miami School District while observing the stakeholders’ needs. However, the school district will encounter a number challenges during negotiations, which it must overcome for successful redistricting. The challenges will include complaints, such as crossing cultural and economic boundaries, increased travel time and expenditure, reduced quality of education, change of property value, and social problems among children. Integrative negotiation techniques will allow both parties to express their ideas and agree on the most appropriate solutions.
