Student assignments will change next year for a couple thousand students who will be moved into new schools and under-used schools, under a plan approved by the Wake County Board of Education on Tuesday night.

The plan is the third and final iteration of the 2022-23 “enrollment plan.” It differs from previous versions in that it drops plans to move Falls River neighborhood students to Durant Road elementary and middle schools, which would have affected a few dozen students. It also drops moving student designated for Panther Creek High School to Green Hope High School.

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Both requests were made by school board members, who cited the proximity the students who were set to be moved had to their currently designated schools.

Assignments remain the same for nearly all of the Wake County Public School System’s about 160,000 students next year, about 98% of them.

But the addition of two new elementary schools and a middle school will move up to about 2,000 students either into those schools or into schools that will lose students to the new schools.

Another few hundred students will move to relieve overcrowded schools and fill under-capacity schools across the district.

The two amendments to the plan proposed by board members Tuesday, and approved, were spurred by families that took issue with efforts to move students out of over-capacity schools or into under-capacity ones.

Abbotts Creek Elementary is capped, and families had protested their children being moved from the school to Durant Road Elementary. The two school campuses are across from each other on Durant Road.

Next year, WCPSS will open Apex Friendship Elementary School, Barton Pond Elementary School in north Raleigh and Hebert Akins Road Middle School in Fuquay-Varina.

Since the first draft of the plan, the district has made a handful of changes, with either no impact on current students or impact on relatively few students.

The final draft approved Tuesday differs from the second draft in that it:

  • Moves fewer students out of Leesville Road High and into Millbrook High
    • Moves a handful of students from Oberlin Middle to Leesville Road Middle
      • Moves fewer York Elementary students to the new Barton Pond Elementary
        • Does not reassign an area near Umstead State Park from Broughton High to Leesville Road High, which likely would have affected students

          The second draft otherwise only differed from the first draft in that it gave Sycamore Creek Elementary parents the option to send their children to a different year-round elementary school instead of their reassigned traditional calendar school of Barton Pond Elementary. It also reassigned other unpopulated areas.

          Most students reassigned under the Wake County Public School System’s enrollment plan would be sent to one of the district’s three new schools, a WRAL News analysis of the district’s first draft shows. The numbers don’t change much in the plan approved Tuesday.

          About 2,300 to 3,000 Wake County children would be affected by the Wake County Public School System’s first draft enrollment plan for next year. The actual figure could be higher because a handful of reassignments involve more than two schools, meaning more children could be moved around than would be reflected in estimates of students lost or gained through reassignment.

          The Wake County Board of Education hosted a public hearing at the end of November on the second draft of the reassignment plan. The first draft was proposed in early October.