School Re-zoning Plan Still Undecided

At a school board meeting last night, Metro Schools director Pedro Garcia backpedaled on proposed changes to several school zones.

The previous plan called for closing five underutilized schools and relieving overcrowding in the Antioch area with the addition of the new Cane Ridge High School. Garcia’s new proposal would get rid of most of the changes to the Hillwood, Hillsboro and Overton clusters while adding some single-gender schools.

School Board Chair Marsha Warden says board members weren’t aware that Garcia was changing his plan.

“What I think has occurred as we have gone through a number of community meetings is some flexibility on the part of the director in trying to incorporate comments that have come through the community meetings from community members.”

The Hillwood cluster was scheduled to lose an elementary school and some students from the Overton schools were to be rezoned into Hillsboro. Parts of North Nashville are in the Hillwood cluster, and under the original plan, many north Nashville kids would be assigned to their neighborhood schools instead of being bussed to schools in West Nashville. That caused many in the community, including a former school board member to have concerns over the re-segregation of some schools.

Warden says she has lots of questions on the new proposal. The school board will be holding a work-through session on the revised plan tomorrow night.