In the upcoming months, Fulton County plans to tear down some schools, build new ones and realign attendance zones, parents were told this week in the first of several meetings aimed at soliciting public input.
The ambitious destruction and construction project is funded by SPLOST IV, which was passed last year and is expected to raise about $500 million. The project includes the closing of three elementary schools – Oak Knoll, Harriet Tubman and Mt. Olive — and building two new ones.
A few dozen parents and community leaders attended this week’s sessions, which concentrated on redrawing school zones. At a Tuesday night meeting at Banneker High School, Fulton officials explained that school attendance zones are being redrawn for middle and high schools in South Fulton to accommodate expanded space at Banneker, which reopened in a new building this year and can now draw students from a wider area.
The district will schedule two more meetings in November, one at Woodland Middle School and one at Banneker High School, and two more in December at the same schools. At the November meetings, officials will present a map of the first version of the attendance zones and ask for opinions. The map will be redrawn and a second version will be presented at the December meeting, and the public will be asked for more comments.
The Fulton Schools executive director of planning, Yngrid Jones-Huff, said parent and community responses are essential to drawing up attendance zones because of “gray” areas not apparent from demographic data, such as knowing which neighborhoods are connected to each other in ways other than geography, such as clubs and churches.
“There’s not really a rule of thumb that you attend the school that is closest to you,” said Jones-Huff, “because there are so many other factors that have to be considered” such as traffic patterns. Students may be placed in a different attendance zone if, for instance, to get to the school, parents and buses have to make a difficult left turn through a congested intersection.
Parent Coreane High attended the Banneker meeting because she wanted some say in where her 5-year-old son will attend when his school is closed. “Are they going to put him in one of the new schools, or in one of the old ones, because some of them are already overcrowded,” she said. “I want him in the new school.”
College Park city councilman Ambrose Clay said he’s concerned that the district is redrawing the attendance zones by including neighborhoods farthest from the school and working inward until the school is at capacity. That could mean students who live closest to a school don’t attend it.
College Park Elementary was torn down two years ago, and students were dispersed to other south Fulton schools. Clay said many of the students at the old College Park Elementary were children of single parents who live in the nearby College Park Housing Authority and don’t have transportation.
“School officials told me there is no guarantee those students will go to the new College Park Elementary when it’s built,” said Clay, “but they they said it’s highly likely everything will be fine because the new school has so much more capacity.” When College Park Elementary was torn down it had about 250 students. The new school, said Clay, will have about 800 students.
After the the second map is presented to the public in December, and opinions are gathered, it will be submitted to the school board, which is expected to take action on it early next year.
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