RAYMOND – The Windham-Raymond school board’s proposal to require northern Windham elementary students to attend Raymond schools in an effort to ease overcrowding issues in Windham was met with strong resistance once again at a public hearing Wednesday night.

After walloping the school board with reasons why it should abandon the redistricting plan at a meeting last week, more than 100 parents, including many who spoke last week, spent another two hours bombarding the board with similar arguments against the shift that they say would disrupt personal and professional lives and alienate children from their network of friends.

The public hearings were designed to solicit feedback from the public. School board members reserved comment for a workshop on the proposal at a meeting next Wednesday, Oct. 17, at Council Chambers in Windham Town Hall. The nine-member board will hold a workshop discussion followed by a special meeting where the board will vote on the matter.

At Wednesday’s hearing, parents raised questions about curriculum equitability, with one mother reading a list of about 20 Windham programs her children would no longer have access to if redistricted to Raymond. Mostly, the unifying theme was loss of choice. Many parents rose to say they moved to Windham, and pay relatively higher Windham taxes, so their children could attend Windham schools, not Raymond schools.

“I live in Windham. I don’t live in RSU 14,” said Nicole Heanssler, who said she and her husband moved to Windham in 2008 from a rural Maine community hoping to lay down roots in a family friendly town. “I don’t want all this shuffling … I think we’re going to lose the roots we’ve set in place for our children. If we’re going to go over the line, we’re going to sever ties with Windham.”

The plan would affect children in grades K-3 living above Whites Bridge Road and Anglers Road. Those children would start attending Raymond schools next fall and continue through grade 8 when they would shift back to Windham. The plan is aimed at fixing capacity disparity in the half-empty Raymond schools and overcrowded Windham schools.

Other parents spoke about how the redistricting is a short-term fix when they say the board should be addressing solutions to aging and overcrowded schools. There was strong support for modular classrooms to ease overcrowding as well as construction of a new wing at Windham Primary School and a new middle school.

Kristen Day, a resident of Windham who lived in Raymond for 20 years, addressed what many said was unfair treatment, in effect casting out northern Windham families from the town they pay taxes to and expect to receive services from.

“District or not, when a town has a K-12 and people live in that town, pay taxes in that town, that’s where kids go. That’s the given. That’s the precedent,” Day said.

Parents spoke on a number of issues. Some raised the specter of dissolution of the RSU saying the two towns are “fundamentally different.” One questioned whether the proposal was a “Trojan horse,” speculating that the board would redraw the district line even further south to Route 115 in future years. Another speaker asked why the capacity issue needed to be addressed if so many Windham parents were comfortable with their child’s education in supposedly overcrowded schools.

Anti-Raymond sentiment, on display at last week’s meeting in Windham, was non-existent at this week’s meeting. One speaker pleaded with Raymond residents and school board members to “put yourselves in our shoes and think about they’d feel if they were left with no choice and they were told this is where your kids are going to go.”