The lines are invisible but the effects are very real.
School attendance boundaries can determine the quality of a child’s education and influence home values. They have the power to create cohesive neighborhoods where families connect and interact, or divide communities into separate spheres.
It’s no wonder parents and community members get so emotional when the boundaries are moved -- and in metro Atlanta districts, they are moved a lot.
Jacqueine Nuckles’ children were not yet school aged when the family’s Cobb County home was redistricted from Dickerson to Dodgen Middle. But Nuckles said she was still upset by the decision, because the school district played a big factor in where the family chose to buy a home.
“We paid a premium for being in Dickerson and our house prices were impacted because of this move,” she said.
Districts like Cobb, Gwinnett and Cherokee typically redraw attendance lines to address growth, while districts like DeKalb and Atlanta are trying to make better use of taxpayer dollars by eliminating empty seats.
The DeKalb school board is scheduled to vote Monday night on an expansive redistricting plan that will affect 9,000 students, about 9 percent of the district’s total enrollment. The plan calls for eight schools to close and boundaries to shift at several others -- changes officials say are overdue and will free up $12.4 million each year.
“You don’t do this every 10 or 15 years, which is what we’re looking at [doing] now,” said Tom Bowen, chairman of the DeKalb County school board. “Good systems, active systems are looking at redistricting every three to five years so that you have a lot of small changes in lieu of the dramatic changes we're having now.”
A regional accrediting agency directed DeKalb last week to follow through with this round of redistricting. The system's boundary discussions have gone on for several years and have incited anger and distrust among some constituents who want the lines to be redrawn, just not the way the plan suggests.
"Sky Haven is in my front yard. I can watch my kids walk to school," DeKalb parent Shanta Christmas told the school board at a public hearing last week. "I know everyone, the principal, the vice principal, the school nurse. My kid got sick today, and I could walk to the school. Leave the school open. It's a community. It's a family."
While DeKalb is trying to eliminate empty seats, Cherokee typically redistricts to create new ones.
The district’s last rezoning was in fall 2010 in preparation for the 2011-12 opening of Indian Knoll Elementary School. The process began, as is standard, with a series of public input sessions scheduled at the effected schools, spokeswoman Carrie Budd said.
“Parents are invited to be an active part of the process,” she said.
Once input is collected, preliminary boundaries are drawn and a public hearing is held with the school board.
Gwinnett County, the state’s largest district, is also familiar with the challenges of rezoning. In 2009 the board approved plans to change the attendance zones for some 8,200 students to accommodate six new schools that opened in 2010.
Parents were notified of proposed attendance boundaries in advance and given comment forms to make suggestions. The district received more than 1,000 forms, and in response redrew the boundaries in some areas to reflect parent input. The district this month is launching another redistricting to address overcrowding at schools in the Peachtree Ridge area.
Melanie Hayduk, a freshman at Gwinnett's new Lanier High School, said she wasn't upset about being rezoned from North Gwinnett High, where her sister graduated. That's because she grew up being flexible -- in elementary school she moved from Sugar Hill to Sycamore. In middle school from the old Lanier building to a new one.
"It's a lot easier because no one knows what to expect," she said of being in a new school.
Redistricting is considered a local issue and there is not a lot of guidance from the state about how school systems should conduct the process. Most districts take a variety of things under consideration when drawing new boundaries. They try to use major roads as dividers, take into account how far students will have to travel to school, and attempt to keep neighborhoods intact.
In Atlanta, where the outcry has been much less vocal, the process has been ongoing over the past dozen years. The system has closed 25 schools since 1999 in response to shifting enrollment patterns and a decline in its overall student population. The reasons have been largely financial, although the system also supports several ongoing academic initiatives that influenced how the closures were made.
Overall, Atlanta enrolled 59,000 students in 1999 -- when Superintendent Beverly Hall was hired -- compared with 49,800 now.
Some parts of the city, however, have seen growth, and the school closures have been tempered by new construction and renovation of other campuses.
Most recently, Atlanta officials announced a proposed $56.2 million land deal to build a new Buckhead-area high school, with plans to turn the city’s existing North Atlanta High campus into a second middle school to relieve crowding at those grade levels.
Staff writer Megan Matteucci contributed to this article.
A regional accrediting agency directed DeKalb to follow through with its redistricting are trying to play catch up after failing to address enrollment problems for several years.
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