Alamance-Burlington superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming has proposed hiring a Raleigh consulting firm to develop new school attendance zones – i.e., redistrict – for ABSS elementary and middle schools in order to balance enrollment between schools deemed overcrowded and those that are under-capacity.
While the focus is primarily on elementary and middle school attendance zones, ABSS officials say it’s too early to rule out the possibility that high school attendance zones could be affected.
“It would probably affect most of the district,” Fleming told school board members during their latest meeting Monday night. “I don’t think it’s going to completely fill up the schools that are under capacity. In general, it’s those areas – Southern [Middle], Garrett [Elementary] – that would be affected. Even on the western side [of the county], we would have to do some things. [It] would probably affect most elementary and middle schools. We know we need more students going to Graham, but if you live right on the line, you’re probably not going to end up going to Graham.”
The firm that Fleming proposes hiring – the Operations Research and Education Laboratory (OREd) at N.C. State University – also recently completed a school capacity and land-use study that the consultants presented to the school board in mid-August.
OREd projects that enrollment in ABSS will increase by 13.7 percent (for an additional 3,056 students) over the next 10 years – reversing the trend over the last 10 years, in which the school system’s enrollment remained static, and in some years, declined.
“Our goal will be for them to take on this task for elementary, middle schools with a spring completion date,” Fleming said Monday night. “Families would be notified in late spring [of] their new assignment if there are changes.”
The changes would take effect at the beginning of the 2026-27 school year, the superintendent said.
OREd would draw new school attendance boundaries using computer analytics and the county’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping software, Fleming told the board.
The pitch
“They would be the only ones to make changes to the lines,” the superintendent explained. “The board would vote, if you wanted to; you could still adjust the lines; but the board would have to vote on that. It’s, I believe, a very fair way to ensure balancing…We certainly don’t want to get into the place where we’re moving students across the county, but we do know we will have to do some balance across the school district.”
Once the draft attendance maps were completed, OREd would hold “a town hall-style meeting” to give parents, families, and students an opportunity to voice their opinions about the changes, Fleming told the board.
Some of the factors that OREd incorporates into developing new school attendance zones include: manmade and natural boundaries, such as roads and geographical features; transportation; and future development plans, according to the firm.
“They will assume certain rules – less busing, closeness to the school,” Fleming told the board. “They will not do anything as to the racial [demographics of schools]; that has been challenged.”
Fleming highlighted one advantage to hiring OREd to draw new school attendance zones using computer analytics and GIS: It takes a lot of the politics out of it, he said Monday night.
“We will have to pay for some of that redistricting,” Fleming said Monday night.
The $34,000 contract that the school board voted to award to OREd in December 2024 covered the cost to develop the school facility capacity study and land-use study, the latter of which examined existing and approved development, infrastructure, and other factors that the consultants said tend to influence future school enrollment trends.
The superintendent told the board Monday night that he’d previously gone through redistricting “with and without the help of OREd” and found the firm’s process to be a lot smoother. “It’s a lot easier because you don’t go through seven or eight drafts…When certain individuals know you are drawing the lines, they also know that you can change the lines. It really changes the conversation.”
Construction of new school to replace A.O. Elementary floated
Fleming said that, if nothing is done, the school system would need to add mobile units at Garrett Elementary and Southern Middle schools. “The worst possible thing we could do right now is add mobiles,” he said, indicating that the movement of students between the school building and mobile units isn’t ideal from a school safety standpoint.
“I know we would probably end up having to bring out the mobile units,” school board member Seneca Rogers said, adding that some parents had asked him “what it would look like” to build a replacement for A.O. Elementary School, given its age. A.O. was built in 1927, renovated in 2000, and expanded in 2011, according to information that ABSS furnished to the newspaper prior to passage of the $150 million bond package in 2018.
“It will either be adding a school or demolishing a school and [rebuilding],” Fleming said. Expanding an aging facility is “not a wise use of taxpayer money,” the superintendent opined, but either way, A.O. students would have to go to other elementary schools or have a “mobile pod unit” while a replacement school is under construction.
Noting that the board had agreed last month to sell as surplus a dozen mobile classroom units, which had been manufactured between 1988 and 1997, school board vice chairman Dan Ingle likened use of mobile units to “putting a band-aid on a problem.”
“We do have some schools that are under capacity,” Ingle said Monday night. “We’ve got about six elementary schools that are at or near capacity – one middle, Southern – and one high, Williams. I hate it for the kids; maybe there’s some way we can figure to do it that doesn’t affect all of them. One thing I don’t want to do is for the board to change it [the attendance zones] four or five times.”
OREd’s capacity study showed that enrollment (769 students) at Garrett Elementary had exceeded its stated capacity (722 students) by 47 students during the second month of the 2024-25 school year – and is projected to exceed capacity by 115 students this school year. Their calculations also showed that enrollment (821 students) at Southern Middle School had exceeded its capacity (756 students) by 65 students at the end of the second month of the 2024-25 school year, based on figures that the consultants presented to school board in mid-August.
The capacity study showed that enrollment at Williams High School (1,195 students as of the second month of 2024-25) was at 98.9 percent of its stated capacity (1,208 students), based on OREd’s calculations.
The enrollment at Southern Middle School is at 110 percent of its capacity, “but then we have other schools that are 40 percent capacity,” Rogers pointed out Monday night.
“When you get to 90 percent of capacity…you could have no seats in kindergarten because of the class size requirement,” Fleming said. The state currently caps maximum class sizes in kindergarten at 18 students. “We’re not getting students in nice little numbers,” the superintendent explained. “There’s an ebb and flow to enrollment.”
High school heartburn
School board members recalled this week the heartburn that the high school redistricting process had created for some students and families.
Then-school board members and ABSS administrators had drawn attendance zones, as part of a high school redistricting plan originally adopted in January 2017 in anticipation of the future construction of a seventh high school. The high school redistricting plan was subsequently revised in late 2022, after multiple iterations of the high school attendance zone maps were considered. The new high school attendance zones took effect concurrent with the opening of Southeast High School at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year.
The 2022 redistricting plan “didn’t make any sense to me, on where kids ended up going,” Rogers said Monday night. While it had been intended to ease overcrowding at Eastern and Southern high schools, students from Graham and other attendance zones also got redistricted, he recalled.
School board member Tameka Harvey responded, “I do want us to think about our children and how it really affects them. In 2023, there were kids who lived three minutes from Graham High School who were sent to Eastern Alamance. That makes no sense. It should make sense for students, families, everyone it involves.”
“There was a lot of shifting of lines,” Ellington-Graves said of the 2022 revision to the high school redistricting plan. “It’s not fun for us; it’s not fun for families; it’s not fun for the community. I don’t think we can go to the commissioners and ask for a bond when we have schools that are under capacity.”
“We’ve got to do the best we can to fill these lower-capacity schools,” Fleming advised the board. “But again, at least as superintendent, I would hate to see a kid going 20 miles to school. That might buy you another year or two from having to build another school. [It’s] going to be tough on the eastern and north side to do that much longer but it at least helps balance it out. OREd would have a chance to pick out a location for a school.”
Fleming also reiterated his earlier warning to the board during a discussion about school capacity: that even if ABSS had the money in hand to build a new school, it would take a minimum of three to four years before it could open.
“There is a need for a new elementary [on] the eastern side, near Elon give or take a few miles,” the superintendent said Monday night, “and then a new middle school on the eastern side quickly behind that one.”
