When Licking Heights Local School District elementary students head back to the classroom on Aug. 15, many of them won’t just be entering a new grade.
A redistribution of students among the district’s three elementary schools, designed to better manage rapid population growth, means nearly half of kindergartners through fourth graders — about 900 of the district’s 1,878 students enrolled in K-4 — will move to different buildings than those they attended last year.
“It’s been simmering for a while now,” said Licking Heights School District Communications Specialist Anna Davies about the need for a districtwide change. “I would say over the past 10 to 15 years, the district has been experiencing a lot of growth, but it’s really been a pretty sharp uptick within the last five years.”
The school district in western Licking County has about 5,600 students enrolled heading into the 2024-2025 school year – more than double the district’s student population in 2003. In addition to the redistricting efforts, a new, larger high school building was opened in the 2020-2021 school year. Just four years later, it is already undergoing construction of an addition that will allow it to hold 300 more students.
For the upcoming school year, young students will begin the year in three school buildings: Broad Peak Elementary, Everest Elementary and North Elementary, although North Elementary will be used only temporarily.
A newly constructed elementary school building – Lima Ridge – is set to open in October 2024, and will replace North Elementary, which will become the new home for Pathfinders Preschool. Lima Ridge students in kindergarten through third grader will start the school year in North Elementary, while fourth-graders will be temporarily housed at Summit Station Intermediate, which is home to the district’s fifth and sixth graders.
“I would say by 2030 we’ll have to build another elementary school,” said Lima Ridge Elementary School Principal Kurt Scheiderer. “Our numbers are quickly growing. You’ve got Facebook, you’ve got Intel; there’s a lot of land in our district and it’s being developed, which is a great thing, but managing the growth is challenging.”
While the redrawing of school boundaries is a big shift for students, families, and faculty alike, administrators are confident that the changes are both necessary and largely positive.
“Ideally, it’s going to allow us to have some smaller class sizes,” said Scheiderer, who added that the moves will make sure “that kids are not crammed into schools.”
“A lot of our English language learning classes, our intervention classes, have been in closets,” he said. “They haven’t been in classrooms. And so we don’t have to deal with that anymore, which is nice. Everybody is going to have a much nicer, more adequate space to provide quality instruction.”
That extra space, especially for English language learning classes, is vital as the district’s student population rises. Since 2016, the Licking Heights Local School District has gained nearly 700 English language learning (ELL) students, and about one in five students in the district are enrolled in ELL classes, according to a January 2024 article from WOSU.
Jhuma Acharya, the district’s family engagement and diversity specialist, said students in the Licking Heights school district speak more than 50 languages, with a significant number of students speaking Nepali, Somali and Spanish. Those students and their families moved to the district in the last decade seeking job opportunities and a sense of community.
“People see the school district as one of the main attraction points,” Acharya said. “They feel more comfortable sending their kids to this school, which is more diverse and a place where everybody is valued and respected.”
But as the population of the community increases, so do the needs of the school. Davies said the district is planning for even more student population growth in the coming years.
That extra space, Davies said, will allow students to get more personalized and individualized support.
“Having that additional space, we’re really trying to grow our paraprofessional support staff for this coming year, because we have a really big special education population,” said Davies. “Having more space in the schools – that’s going to allow more spaces where kids can get that more personalized support they might need, whether that be for language intervention, for reading or math intervention at the elementary level, and also just having more space to accommodate that growing special education population because students have such a unique range of needs.”
Redrawing school boundaries will also tackle transportation issues, such as low staffing and long routes – challenges faced by public school districts nationwide following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We had a lot of really great feedback from our transportation department in the redistricting process,” said Davies. “Because they’re really well versed with the intricacies of our district, because they’re driving these roads and these routes every day, they offered some really helpful feedback that we ended up taking and implementing with the redistricting process.
In addition to the transportation department, the redistricting team led by Cooperative Strategies – a consulting firm that helps schools assess, design and manage changes such as redistricting – gathered extensive feedback from the community. Between November 2023 and February 2024, the district sent online surveys to families and hosted town halls, and superintendent Kevin Miller invited individuals with questions and concerns to meet with him one-on-one.
The result of these conversations was a commitment by the team to three goals in redrawing the boundaries: assigning entire neighborhoods to the same school, sending the largest possible number of students to the school closest to their homes, and accommodating future growth with minimal changes.
All neighborhoods were kept together in the final redistricting plan, and 63% of students – the highest percentage of any of the plans presented to the community – will attend the school closest to their home.
“We are just incredibly grateful to our community here at Licking Heights, because I feel like so many people are just really committed to helping the district be the best that it can be,” Davies said of the feedback and support the district has received. “If there’s one thing that I want to express, it’s just gratitude to the community for being so adaptable and being so involved and engaged.”
Elementary schoolers and their families can expect a warm welcome come August 14, when each school will host open houses, a chance for all students to get involved with their community, new and old.
Emma Baum writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.