Forsyth County Schools released drafts of middle and high school redistricting plans during the Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 13, to allow the community to look over the plans and provide feedback.
The school system provided drafts of both the middle and high school maps on its website along with plans for how many students from each of the schools they plan to move during the redistricting process for the openings of East Forsyth High school and Hendricks Middle School in August 2021
According to the overview of moves provided, as of now, the system plans to move students from Liberty, Otwell and Vickery Creek Middle Schools to populate the upcoming Hendricks Middle School. Through the plan, 1,175 students would move to Hendricks, taking up more than 79% of the school’s capacity.
The plans also detail a move of students from North Forsyth Middle to Liberty, from Liberty to Otwell Middle, and from Otwell to Vickery Creek Middle.
“So those are the moves that we did to populate Hendricks and to clean up any feeder patterns that we needed to,” Deputy Superintendent Joey Pirkle said at the meeting. “And when I say that I mean, if in moving some of these areas it created a feeder pattern issue where there’s less than 20%, then we went back and looked at that.”
Looking at the high school redistricting plans, leaders from Forsyth County Schools plan to move more than 1,000 students from North Forsyth to the new East Forsyth High School along with nearly 500 students from Forsyth Central High School.
The plans also call for a move of students from West Forsyth High School to North Forsyth High School.
For more information on the overview of moves and to view drafts of the middle and high school redistricting maps, visit the Forsyth County Schools website.
Community members can provide feedback on the website by following a link to a survey. The survey will be open through Oct. 28.
The school system also plans to hold public forums to hear further feedback from community members.
The first forum on the middle school draft map will be held at Forsyth Central at 6 p.m., on Thursday, Oct. 22. The second forum on the high school draft map will be held at North Forsyth at 6 p.m., on Tuesday, Oct. 27.
After Oct. 28, Forsyth County Schools staff plans to reconvene to review the public’s feedback, both from the online survey and from the public forums, along with feedback from the Board of Education.
The schools were budgeted to cost a collective $125 million to build with the aim of relieving overcrowding at nearby schools.