Despite Opposition, Redistricting Proposal To Remain As Is

Attendance zone boundaries could be set Tuesday for Paulding County Schools’ newest middle school, and altered for four of the district’s eight existing middle schools—, , and .

The school system is going through the redistricting process with its middle schools as officials , which . Redistricting is being utilized to fill the new school and relieve overcrowding in some of the district’s existing middle schools.

The redistricting maps set to be considered by Paulding County School Board members are prior to . The same maps spurred an email campaign put on by residents in the Thornwood Community, Pickett’s Mill and Pickett’s Plantation subdivisions , as the plan would move their students out of the attendance zone of McClure Middle School and into that of East Paulding Middle School.

A petition on thepetitionsite.com had 166 signatures supporting those residents’ opposition of the redistricting plan. Terri Little, who lives in the Thornwood subdivision, and began the online petition and crafted the talking points memo sent by affected residents. She, along with other affected residents, posted signs outside their subdivisions to get the word out about the redistricting proposal and meetings.

“My 8- and 11-year old children are affected in the redistricting to a severely underperforming middle school. My high-schooler will not be affected yet but travel between campuses will cost my family unnecessarily,” Little says, adding that she has requested to speak to the board during Tuesday’s meeting.

Paul Kohler, a resident of Pickett’s Mills subdivision, says academic performance is one of his reasons for opposing the move from McClure to East Paulding. His wife Johanna is one of the individuals leading the opposition effort; the couple has two children who would eventually be affected by the redistricting.

“My kids will have to attend a middle school that is ranked in the bottom 25 percent of all the middle schools in the state. Under the current districting, they would be attending a middle school that is ranked in the top 20 percent of middle schools,” Kohler said. “As a parent, I simply want what is best for my children. Given the poor performance of East Paulding Middle School, I don’t feel it has an environment that is conducive to learning.”

Kohler adds that he believes the move is an attempt by the district to raise East Paulding’s test scores. “The School Board’s focus should be educating the children entrusted to them, not raising test scores by importing high performing children from better schools. No one wins, the children currently in the school will continue to underperform, and the high performers will be forced into an environment that is not suited to them.

“In addition to the school performance, I am also concerned about my property values.  The proposed redistricting will certainly have a negative impact on the property values in my neighborhood.”

Stacy Bradshaw, a Pickett’s Plantation resident, says her neighborhood is in an area that would be isolated by the attendance zone changes—a move that would impact, among others, her daughter.

“By not maintaining the current line of Highway 92, our students will not only be sent to another school, but they will be sent there without most everyone they currently go to school with,” Bradshaw said. “My daughter is to return to the same school campus to attend high school [at North Paulding]; however, they will not allow her to ride the school bus to complete middle school [at McClure] on the same campus.”

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“We recognize redistricting is a difficult process,” Associate Superintendent Brian Otott said. “The 67 students that we’ve heard from through the email … that area will relieve overcrowding in the future at McClure Middle School. We were very upfront and transparent from the beginning of this process.”

Otott said have remained unaltered and will be among the items up for consideration by board members on Tuesday.

“We’ve done more to engage the community than as a district we have in my experience in the years I’ve been here,” Otott said. “We recognize that sometimes people view this as winner/loser mentality about redistricting, but ultimately, we know that we’ve made every attempt to engage the community, we’ve listened to feedback—most recently, we modified attendance zone boundaries at P.B. Ritch Middle School based on feedback. This particular situation, with these students remaining to be redistricted in this proposal, does alleviate some student population for McClure, but it also creates a feeder pattern to where all the students that would be attending Russom Elementary School would go together to East Paulding Middle School—currently, only these three subdivisions that we’re talking about here of all the students who attend Russom go to McClure.”

Parents have been made aware and kept abreast of the redistricting process since September, Otott said, with officials basing their attendance zone changes on the data they have. With the use of a student information program and a transportation department program that takes students’ addresses and turns them into “dots on the map,” he said officials are able to see the student densities along the county’s roads and in neighborhoods.

“It does start with the raw data and the numbers, and you have to an idea of where you’re going, you have to have a plan in mind, and ours from the beginning was that we need to get a new middle school opened and we need to eliminate overcrowding at Moses and McClure,” he said. “And basically then you have to start looking at areas that you can modify the attendance boundaries.

“We know that the north end continues to grow. It’s the only grouping in our community that continues to experience growth, while the rest are experiencing flat or declining enrollment. We know we have to address this. We want to make sure that we have schools where students are not in overcrowded conditions, where we have an excessive number of mobile units like we’ve had in the past—we feel that’s a better environment for our students.”

With the redistricting plan, Moses Middle would be taken down to about 600 students—a number Otott says would be “very manageable.” The reduction in student numbers, he said, would eliminate Moses’ need for portable classrooms to be used for regular education classrooms.

McClure currently has no mobile units on its campus, and a recent addition to the school increased its capacity to 1,125 students. Despite the size, Otott says officials will have to keep their eyes on the North Paulding school. “We’re at the point there where adding on doesn’t appear to be a viable option. When you’ve capped your building potential, then you are looking at going into mobiles. And we know that they’re something that we’d have to use, but we try to avoid it if at all possible,” he said.

“We’re going to have to continue to watch the area and growth patterns because we see continued growth there, but I feel like the redistricting plan is one that allows us to be proactive and to meet those goals we’ve stated from the beginning.”

Dallas-Hiram Patch will be live blogging . Look for more preview coverage of the meeting on our site tomorrow morning.