The DeKalb County School District has heard from thousands of people in the last few months that its redistricting process — the one in which roughly two dozen schools were slated for possible closure thanks to declining enrollment districtwide — wasn’t working.

Now, DeKalb leaders are going back to the drawing board on the multimillion-dollar and multiyear effort to deal with nearly 20,000 empty classroom seats.

School closures are still a possibility, but the district is changing when it focuses on which schools. Up first, district officials announced Tuesday, will be communities where new schools are slated to open in the next few years — mostly in the northern and central parts of the county. The district plans to have independent, local facilitators lead discussion in each cluster to find solutions specific to each community. Discussions about underenrolled schools, concentrated in the southern portion of the county, won’t start until 2027.

An evolving process

Originally, DeKalb leaders planned to take a districtwide approach, first looking at building suitability and then looking at student attendance boundaries and where special programs were placed. The district released two “scenarios,” which showed roughly two dozen schools that could possibly close and were meant to be a starting point for community discussion.

But feedback from the community said it felt like decisions had already been made and that it was impossible to separate conversations about facilities and programs.

“We heard you, and the process is evolving because of it,” said interim Superintendent Norman Sauce in a video announcing the new approach.

Now, district leaders plan to look at specific communities and start in those that have new or expanded schools opening between August 2027 and August 2029.

A new Dresden Elementary and an updated Idlewood Elementary are slated to open in August; a classroom addition and the modernization of Cross Keys High are set to complete in August 2028; and a new Sequoyah Middle and High are scheduled to open in August 2029. This will create a new high school cluster and affect which schools students attend in the area.

That’s why the DeKalb will restart the redistricting process by evaluating the attendance boundaries, buildings and programs in the nearby Lakeside, Cross Keys, Chamblee, Tucker, Dunwoody and Druid Hills clusters.

The board is still expected to vote on changes to attendance boundaries in those areas in December 2026.

Starting in 2027, the district will restart the community engagement process in clusters with underenrolled schools: Towers, Columbia, McNair, Cedar Grove, Miller Grove and MLK. No date has been set for the board to vote on recommendations related to those areas.

The district unveiled the changes to the process to members of the Student Assignment Project Committee last week, Decaturish.com reported, and formalized them Tuesday on its website.

‘They have listened’

While some are disappointed by the apparent delay, this is exactly what other parents have been hoping for.

They hosted rallies, created websites to share information and dove into the data available around the redistricting process. They found flaws in the methodology used to identify schools for possible closure, pointed out equity problems and took issue with the firm the district hired to facilitate the process, HPM. They wanted the district to reconsider putting their school on the closure list, or at least slow down the decision-making process.

“I’m just so frustrated the board does not seem to be listening to us,” said Jennifer Alexander-Sanchez, an Evansdale Elementary parent, in April. On Tuesday, she posted the district’s announcement in a Facebook group dedicated to keeping the school open with a caption that read in part: “They have listened.”

District officials maintained that the process was ongoing, and they were still collecting data to determine which schools would close, including feedback from the community. The goal is to make sure resources are more equitably distributed across the district.