This story was reported and written by WHRO media partner Williamsburg Watch
Williamsburg-James City County school parents got a look last week at proposed maps to redistrict school attendance zones — a task one of the schools’ consultants described as one of the more difficult jobs they’ve undertaken.
“We understand there is an emotional connection to your schools,” Marci Horner, a member of the MGT consulting team, told parents at one of the informational meetings Wednesday at Berkeley Middle School. “There was a lot of hard, intentional work that went into this.”
The schools are preparing to redistrict school attendance zones next year as they open two new Bright Beginnings preschool facilities in the fall of 2027. The school system held three informational meetings this week with a team from MGT, the firm WJCC Schools hired to guide them through the redistricting process.
School officials have been pushing to get the word out after a survey of stakeholders showed less than half of local residents said they were aware of the project.
The opening of the two Bright Beginnings locations — one on the campus of Clara Byrd Baker Elementary School and the other at Norge Elementary School — will free up classroom space at five elementary schools currently housing the program.
While the opening of the two Bright Beginnings facilities will impact the elementary schools, the division is redistricting at all grade levels to provide for better utilization of schools across the board, said Dr. Daniel Keever, W-JCC Schools superintendent.
Lance Richards of MGT said the W-JCC Schools division was one of the more difficult projects the firm has worked on, because of capacity issues, geographic locations and the fact that “your feeder patterns are unique.”
Richards explained that part of the process involved student forecasts based on birth rate, geographic mobility and student yield, the number of students predicted based on new housing developments.
Four of the division’s elementary schools — D.J. Montague, James River, Matthew Whaley, and Stonehouse — are near or above capacity.
There are 27 active housing development projects that will likely impact eight of the elementary schools, with 64% of the new housing units zoned for Stonehouse elementary.
Richards said the optimal capacity should be around 85% for each school. If nothing changes with the current zoning, “there will be a lot of empty seats and there are costs to that,” he added.
MGT used a number of guiding principles to draw the new zoning maps, including feeder patterns; transportation; minimizing impact on students and their families; demographics and keeping neighborhood schools as much as possible.
Horner, another member of the MGT team, noted in presenting the maps that the firm tried its best to eliminate island zones — a geographically separated pocket of students assigned to a school that is not contiguous with the school’s main attendance boundary — as well as non-contiguous boundaries, while better aligning feeder patterns.
Community members should see a final map by October and can comment on the drafts and the process on the school website.
