Rowan-Salisbury Board of Education members deliberately stayed away from the school redistricting committee meeting last week.

They should miss a few more.

Without board members dominating the conversation, the rest of the committee may feel freer to brainstorm and speak up. It’s time for this group to start making solid progress.

The idea that surfaced last week —that of creating choice zones among some schools —opens up interesting possibilities. It could offer only a watered-down compromise solution. But it shows creative thinking, and could spawn even better ideas from the committee.

How would a choice zone work?It’s still just a rough concept, but the proposal goes something like this:Rather than force students to switch from an overcrowded school to an underutilized school — say, from West Rowan High School to Salisbury — the board would create a zone between the two schools. Students who lived there could take their choice of which high school they wanted to attend.

That sounds nice in theory, but one has to wonder if a substantial number of students would take advantage of it.

Logic suggests that many students would switch to a school where there’s more room, especially if the academic standards there are high. But high-school loyalties are not all about logic. A lot of emotion and tradition play into the decision. Parents choose not only the kind of education their children get, but also the people they will associate with. And they usually want to continue associating with the kids and families they’ve known since elementary school. It’s human nature.

If the committee does settle on a choice plan, they should give families the option of making choices all along the education spectrum, from elementary to high school, not just for the last four years of school. Isenberg Elementary and Knox Middle could be logical choices for families who live closer to the city of Salisbury than they do to Hurley Elementary and the extremely overcrowded West Rowan Middle School.

Creating one or more of such zones —say, between Salisbury and West, South and West, Salisbury and North, or East and North — could help bring down the walls that divide different parts of the Rowan-Salisbury system. Over time, the concept could bring about significant change.

Whether the system can be patient enough to let that happen is another matter. West Rowan High School’s enrollment is 72 students over capacity, even with one mobile classroom. More subdivisions in that area are in the works. How many more trailers or classroom additions are taxpayers willing to pay for, while classrooms at other schools sit empty?

The redistricting committee meets again next Tuesday. The public looks forward to further exploration of this and other ideas.