District Staff: Leave Free Home Elementary Attendance Zone in Place

Photo credit: Patch file

Parents who have children attending Free Home Elementary School have made it loud and clear that they do not want to change the school’s boundaries to relieve overcrowding.

That message is part of preliminary recommendations made by Cherokee County School District staff with regards to the district’s 2015-16 school boundaries.

The Cherokee County School Board on Thursday will hold a public input session on the preliminary recommendations. The input session will be held at 6:30 p.m. — followed by the board’s meeting at 7 p.m. — at the historic Canton High School/School Board Auditorium in downtown Canton.

School district staff held three boundary focus group meetings to discuss possible solutions to overcrowding at Free Home Elementary. Two meetings were held at Free Home and another was held at Ball Ground Elementary STEM Academy.

The meeting with Ball Ground parents covered a possible student shift from Free Home into their boundary area. Parents and community members at both schools were asked to make suggestions and provide feedback to help address the issues on the table.

In light of the review of parent and stakeholder feedback, district staff is not recommending any changes to Free Home’s boundary for the 2015-15 school year.

According to the district’s preliminary recommendations, parents who attended the boundary focus group meetings were “cautioned that staff will continue to closely monitor residential development/student population growth in the Free Home boundary and, if the school enrollment continues to increase and subsequently meets or exceeds 140 percent of this school’s capacity, the actions outlined in school board policy FDBD concerning critical overcrowding will be considered.”

Free Home Elementary is operating at 135 percent capacity. The school already has three mobile classrooms being used for overcrowding relief, with no room on campus for additional units.

Another proposed change is to reconfigure Ball Ground Elementary from a kindergarten through sixth grade to a kindergarten through fifth grade facility. The change realigns Ball Ground with the other elementary schools in the Innovation Zone whose students move on to attend Creekland Middle School.

Additionally, staff is recommending the board approve the relocation of the Little River Pre-kindergarten program to Johnston Elementary, which “will provide Little River Elementary School with additional capacity to assist in alleviating its current overcrowding conditions.”

Other recommendations include correcting scrivener’s errors to move the eastern most portion of a planned Hickory Flat development (which is currently in the planning stages) along Lower Birmingham Road into the Hickory Flat Elementary, Dean Rusk Middle and Sequoyah High boundary areas; and correct another error to the Arnold Mill Elementary boundary by moving the eastern most portion of the WoodView subdivision (which is under construction) into the Little River Elementary boundary area.