Following a ceremony attended by Governor Nathan Deal to honor local veterans with their high school diplomas, the Hall County School Board got down to business laying out the initial redistricting plans for the 2018-2019 school year.
The proposed Middle and High School District No. 7 will be on the southern corridor of the county along the Gwinnett and Barrow County line. The yet to be named high school will be located where the current Flowery Branch High School is on Spout Springs Road with an also yet to be named middle school right beside it.
Flowery Branch High School will be moved back to its old location, currently C.W. Davis Middle School, on Hog Mountain Road. C.W. Davis Middle will take over the facilities of the current South Hall Middle School across the street on Falcon Parkway.
One of the primary reasons Flowery Branch High was moved was due to a lack of parking on the Hog Mountain property. A renovation project is expected to produce 150 new parking spaces, making it capable of housing a high school again.
The only new facility in all this movement will be the new South Hall Middle School located next to Johnson High on Poplar Springs Road. A $19-million-dollar construction project is set to produce a facility capable of housing 1,500 students.
“What this does is takes two fairly overcrowded districts and in 2018-19 breaks them into three districts,” said Will Schofield, superintendent of Hall County schools.
Only Johnson and Flowery Branch High Schools, along with their accompanying middle schools (South Hall and C.W. Davis), will be affected by this redistricting. Everything else, including all elementary school district lines, will remain the same.
The schoolboard will not take any formal action on these proposed district lines until June. In the meantime, the schoolboard has launched an interactive website for parents and students to view the proposed new school zones and find out what schools fall within their district. There is also a form at the bottom of the page for people to share their thoughts with the schoolboard.
“We are looking for feedback and opportunity,” Schofield said.
There are also expected to be two public meetings, one at Johnson High and one at the current Flowery Branch High School, before the schoolboard votes on this issue in June.
A common question that tends to come up whenever a schoolboard decides to redistrict is whether or not students will be allowed to be grandfathered in to their current schools, as well as what teachers and coaches are going where.
Schofield said none of that has been set in stone and won’t be until August.
“Our early indications are that maybe we’d have as many that would want to stay as that would want to go,” he said. “If that’s the case, then almost everybody would be able to be granted their grandfathering wishes.”
If too many students want to go to one school over the others, seniors will be given priority followed by juniors and then sophomores.
