Parents in the North Atlanta High School cluster of Atlanta Public Schools are poised to get everything they wanted out of the Atlanta Public Schools redistricting process.
Late on Sunday evening, March 4, Atlanta Public Schools released Superintendent Erroll Davis’ preliminary school zoning recommendations. The bottom line: no elementary school boundaries in Buckhead will change and there will be no new Middle School mixing Buckhead students with students from Centennial Place Elementary, which is not in the North Atlanta cluster.
The school rezoning process was designed to balance underutilized schools with overcrowded schools. Buckhead parents were furious when earlier proposals suggested moving students from different clusters into their overcrowded school districts.
Davis’ proposal follows closely the final recommendations of consultants hired to draw up the initial map proposals. Davis left open the door for using Sutton Middle as a sixth grade academy at some point in the future, an idea enthusiastically supported by some parents. The sixth grade academy would be exclusively for sixth grade students, and the middle school at the North Atlanta High site would educate grades seven through eight. North Atlanta High School will move to the former IBM campus on Northside Parkway.
Davis said E. Rivers Elementary would be completely rebuilt in 2013 and the current Sutton site would need to house E. Rivers students for 18 months during that time. Davis said the student populations at Morris Brandon and Garden Hills Elementary schools will be monitored and decisions about how to handle overcrowding at these schools will be made at some future date.