Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) will host its final community input session at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday in the Santa Fe High School auditorium. The district has held a series of input sessions starting in August, listening to parents’ concerns about distance, school quality and student adjustment to new schools. 

The district has already incorporated the community’s feedback into its most recent maps, according to Jackie Johnson, communications director. Johnson said citizens who attended the meetings have been understanding of rezoning’s importance, but many have requests and suggestions as well. 

“As far as their major concerns, they all completely understandably tend to focus on what would happen with their children and what would happen with their neighborhood,” Johnson said in a phone interview. 

The difficulty of rezoning, Johnson noted, is that any time one zoning line moves it has a domino effect that changes the situation of multiple families. 

To help understand the demographics and travelability of each area, the district hired DRMP, a civil engineering company. DRMP tells the district about the effects each change would have and makes suggestions based on the data it has collected. 

The school district is using enrollment counts from August to estimate where returning students will be zoned next year. According to the rezoning presentation, the estimate cannot be 100% accurate because students and families are constantly moving around, and the district cannot predict which students may choose to join or leave a charter, private or home school option. 

The proposed rezoning currently supports a general shift eastward to fill in underpopulated schools on the east side of the county, with the exception of Terwilliger Elementary, whose zone is planned to move entirely. 

Currently, the district can place students at overcrowded schools in portable buildings, but the cost is high. The district uses 324 portables, but about 100 of those are leased, costing $815,000 each year. Moving any portable to a new location costs $20-25,000, according to Johnson. 

The rezoning process should redistribute students to reduce overcrowding, and Johnson said reaching that goal would also help cut costs by getting rid of some leased portables. She said the constant movement of students makes it impossible to fully get rid of the need for portables, but the district hopes for significant reductions. 

Johnson said the rezoning process has also been a learning process for the district as it is pushed to rethink its use of space. Some schools have hard-wired computer labs, but also have programs to provide students with personal devices to use. Johnson said those rooms could be converted back into classrooms to add capacity to a school. 

School capacity refers only to the physical space at the school, but the district is also still working to fill teacher and bus driver shortages. Johnson said the driver shortages should be helped by a recent decision to eliminate courtesy busing in the district. 

ACPS is also looking into reducing seats for incoming freshmen at magnet schools, or possibly adding more magnet schools to different schools to spread the enrollment more evenly. 

The School Board of Alachua County has scheduled a rezoning workshop for 10 a.m. on Oct. 16, with the first reading of the proposed zones at the regular board meeting the following evening. 

A public hearing for the rezoning is scheduled for the board’s Nov. 14 meeting, and a final vote on the second reading is planned for Dec. 5.