Town hall meetings will be held next week as Roanoke City Public Schools moves toward its first substantial attendance zone changes in 17 years.
The division is reviewing its zones in hopes of alleviating student overcrowding, effectively using each school building’s capacity, making access to programs and services equitable and keeping kids in the schools nearest to their homes, the division’s project webpage says.
School board policy states that the board should review attendance zones as population and demographics shift, said RCPS spokesperson Claire Mitzel, adding that “It was time for the board to look at this anyway.”
The boundary changes will take place in phases. The first phase will balance attendance zones on the north side of the city, starting with four elementary schools: Preston Park, Monterey, Round Hill and Westside. The division has 17 elementary schools.
The process started with a 2024 facility study, which looked at the utilization of the division’s buildings, their capacity and the age of the buildings. This study included all of the division’s schools. RCPS has a total of 24 schools and over 13,000 students.
The study’s top recommendation was to first address high school overcrowding, but Mitzel said that project does not have a timeline. Building a third high school would be a long and costly process. RCPS had planned to implement modular classrooms to add space to each high school, but is no longer considering that option due to ongoing budget constraints.
The division decided to move forward with the second recommendation from that study, Mitzel said, which was to address “uneven utilization” across elementary schools.
In October, the school board authorized the initiation of a boundary study. Recommendations were made by a steering committee made up of school staff and parents, who have met weekly since October, Mitzel said.
Those recommendations will be shared during a virtual town hall meeting Monday and an in-person town hall Wednesday at Preston Park Elementary School. The public will also be invited to participate in a survey regarding the recommendations, which will include an interactive map of the boundaries.
Preston Park is being rebuilt and will reopen this fall following the $44 million project, which is designed to fix its current capacity issues and create more room for students from other elementary schools. Since this will create more capacity in the northern part of the city, Mitzel said the division decided to start the attendance zone changes there. Capacity issues elsewhere could be solved in these initial zone changes, she said.
Populations have changed since the last attendance zone changes in 2009, and some schools are not being used to their full capacity, while others are over capacity, Mitzel said.
The existing Preston Park is currently one of the most overcrowded elementary schools in the division, she said, with some teachers having to bring groups of students out into the hallways to do their work.
This would mark the third major change to the division’s attendance zones in over five decades. Historically, RCPS bused students to non-neighborhood schools as part of a court-ordered desegregation plan that began in 1971, the RCPS site says.
In 2009, Mitzel said, neighborhoods were diverse enough to reevaluate having students attend the schools closest to their neighborhoods.
Mitzel noted that not all students at the schools listed will need to relocate to another school — “It’s a small number based on if they’re in the area that will be adjusted.” An interactive map with the current attendance zones can be found on the city’s website.
Monday’s virtual town hall meeting will be held from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., and will be available to watch through Microsoft Teams. The division’s site says a link will be posted closer to the meeting.
Wednesday’s in-person town hall will be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Preston Park Elementary School, 3142 Preston Ave. N.W., and will include a tour of the new school.
The survey will be posted on Monday for families and staff to submit feedback on the recommended changes.
