Southwest Bend residents Terri Kloch and Leanne Kozub each have a daughter in sixth grade at Cascade Middle School. Their families live very close to each other, on either side of Brookswood Boulevard.

They expected their kids, who are friends, would eventually attend the new high school now being built in southeast Bend.

But in all three proposed new attendance area maps released this week by Bend-La Pine Schools, southwest Bend is split among three high schools. And because one of the boundaries is Brookswood, Kloch and Kozub’s daughters will attend different high schools — the new school on Knott Road and Bend High School.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Koch said Thursday after she saw the proposed maps. “I was dumbfounded. I just feel like our kids are getting a bum deal.”

Kloch and Kozub are two of a number of parents, many from southwest Bend, who are upset about the proposed new attendance areas for Bend middle and high schools. Other parent reactions have ranged from surprise to hope.

Julia Sandvall, whose daughter is a fourth grader at Pine Ridge Elementary, lives in the part of southwest Bend where students could get rezoned into Bend High’s attendance area . She said traveling from her neighborhood to central Bend, where Bend High is located, is much more difficult than going from southwest to southeast.

“I’m surprised that (our zone) wouldn’t be the new high school, because it would be a whole lot easier to get over there,” Sandvall said at a Bend-La Pine map presentation Tuesday.

Sandvall noted that she would have to use busy streets like Reed Market Road and Third Street to get to Bend High from her neighborhood. Using Murphy and Knott roads to get to southeast Bend is less of a hassle, she said.

Kloch had nearly identical feelings regarding traffic.

“Going up through (Brookswood), and along Reed Market and Third Street, it’s hideous traffic,” she said.

But Beth Thomas, whose daughter is a seventh grader at Pacific Crest Middle School in NorthWest Crossing, said one of the three potential attendance area would ease traffic concerns for her neighborhood. Where she lives, near the intersection of O.B. Riley Road and NW Empire Avenue, is zoned for Sky View Middle School, in northeast Bend.

Thomas said she successfully filed an attendance area change request so her daughter could attend Pacific Crest, because of the congestion on Empire Avenue. She supports one of the three proposed maps, which would rezone the O.B. Riley area to Pacific Crest and Summit High School, rather than Sky View and Mountain View High School.

“The traffic on Empire … has gotten worse and worse,” Thomas said. “It is much quicker for my family, from our neighborhood, to come to Summit, than to get to and from Mountain View.”

Melissa Adams, whose eighth-grade daughter will likely be rezoned from Summit to Bend High as a sophomore in 2021, said she was fine with the move. As a member of the LGBTQ community, Adams said she’d heard that Bend High was more welcoming for those students, and also that it was more socioeconomically in the middle compared to Summit.

“The disparity at Summit, the wealth gap, concerns me,” Adams said. “I want there to be less extremes, which I think is more likely to happen at Bend High.”

Cherish Perry Schroeder, who lives in southwest Bend and has two kids at Cascade Middle, said her concern with the boundary wasn’t with transportation, but rather splitting up her kids. When her daughter enters high school in 2022, her son will be a senior at Summit High, while her daughter will be zoned for Bend High.

“Do we want two kids going to two different high schools for a year?” Perry Schroeder said. “That could be problematic.”

Lora Nordquist, Bend-La Pine’s assistant superintendent and the administrator overseeing the attendance area process, said it hasn’t been determined whether the school district will prioritize attendance area change requests from families to avoid splitting up siblings. But in the past, those requests have usually been honored, she said.

Nordquist also asked parents to voice their concerns in the district’s online surveys, available in both English and Spanish.

Jennifer Souza, a parent of a Pacific Crest student who’s volunteered to help re-write attendance zones for Bend-La Pine for seven years, said she sympathized with anxious parents. But she emphasized that the group of volunteers and district staff who create the maps try to consider transportation, traffic and not splitting up neighborhoods.

She added that academically and socially, there isn’t a bad school in Bend.

“You really can’t go wrong with any of the schools in Bend,” Souza said.

Nordquist said the district has heard parental complaints, and that the final map approved in the spring will likely look different than the proposed maps based on community input.

“Things will change,” Nordquist said.