Henrico School Board stalls school boundary change proposal

Henrico School Board members decided to hold off on a proposal to change the attendance zones of four high schools by a 3-2 informal vote at their Feb. 27 meeting. 

The proposal would shift school boundaries to move 190 students from Douglas S. Freeman High School to Mills E. Godwin High School in order to alleviate overcrowding at Freeman, and would also change boundaries to move 76 students out of Highland Springs High School and add a total of 139 students into Henrico High School to help balance capacity between the two schools.

The school board requested that Henrico Schools Superintendent Amy Cashwell provide more information about how the proposal would impact staffing, class sizes, and transportation routes at their next meeting on March 13 and also decided to hold off on planning any community input sessions on the proposal.

An enrollment count taken in January – factoring in Advanced Career Education (ACE) Center students – put Freeman at about 100.3%-101.4% overcapacity, the highest percentage among high schools, and J.R. Tucker High School at about 99.4%-100.3%, the second highest in capacity. Henrico High School had the lowest capacity of all high schools at only 61.6%-63.8%.

Freeman-Godwin proposal

With a student body of 1,836 in a school built for 1,760 students – and the original main part of the building, including the cafeteria, auditorium, and main hallways, initially made for just 1,000 students – Freeman is at a “tipping point,” said school board chair Marcie Shea (Tuckahoe District), and needs immediate relief.

“They are just, flat out, out of space. They are out of master schedule tricks,” she said. “There’s some study halls happening in gym spaces. There’s some classrooms that have had, approved by facilities, walls put up to divide them to make more space. They have gotten as creative as they can.”

The proposed changes would move an area of neighborhoods north of Patterson Avenue and south of Three Chopt Road from Freeman’s zone into the zone for Godwin – which currently has a capacity of about 83%. HCPS chose that particular area in an effort to keep student cohorts together and make sure that most elementary school students would end up going to the same high school as their classmates, said HCPS school planning specialist Rachel Thayer.

However, with the proposal recommended to go into effect during the 2026-2027 school year, current eighth graders in the adjusted area would have two options – they could either “opt-in” to go to Godwin as a freshman, a year before the changes go into effect, or they could continue onto Freeman and be “grandfathered” in with the other current students, meaning they would be able to graduate from Freeman despite boundary changes.

The “expanded grandfathering” would allow all students who were already at Freeman before fall 2026 to keep attending the school, limiting disruptions for families, said Shea.

“With this pocket and the limited scope, I think we can offer more generous grandfathering than we can in more complex adjustments,” she said. “I believe in doing what’s best for kids and families with the hand we’ve been dealt when we can, instead of limiting options that disrupt students.”

Highland Springs-Henrico proposal

The proposal would also move a selected area west of Glenwood Golf Club, including a new housing development planned for that neighborhood, from Highland Springs’ zone into Henrico’s zone. Highland Springs is currently around 83% capacity.

Henrico High School has had a declining enrollment in recent years, said board member Ryan Young (Fairfield District), which can have outcomes just as negative as overcrowding – such as clubs and sports teams without enough members, impacting the culture of the school.

“Henrico is getting squeezed. We’re in the middle of the county, we’re getting squeezed from the left side…and the right side, and it’s slowly shrinking to the point where we don’t have enough students there. And that drives culture,” said Young. “I know the band enrollment is down. Henrico High School can’t fill a varsity baseball team…We don’t have enough students to be involved in these programs.”

While Henrico High will have a new cybersecurity specialty center added in 2026-2027 – bringing in more students from across the division – Young emphasized the need for more students from the surrounding area to attend the school.

“Even though I’m excited about cybersecurity, I still want more of the community in the actual school than the programming coming in from all over infiltrating the school,” he said. “We still need a solid base of community and collaboration with the children and the students that live nearby…We want to make sure the community stays going to their schools.”

Students in the affected area would have the same grandfathering and opt-in opportunities as students moved from Freeman to Godwin.

Resistance to proposed changes

Several school board members, however, were hesitant to sign off on the boundary changes. Vice-chair Madison Irving (Three Chopt District) suggested that HCPS look into changing the number of specialty center seats or providing more out-of-building internship opportunities before altering school boundaries. 

“I think that redistricting or boundary adjustments is the toughest thing a school board does and I think it is the most emotionally charged thing, so I think it can never be taken lightly,” he said. “I would like us to have more options brought to the table and always consider boundary adjustments to be a last resort.”

Irving also brought up the overcrowding at Tucker High, a situation not addressed by the current proposal. 

“I don’t think that in good conscience I could allow students from one school to opt-in to switching to another school but not as well have that opportunity offered to students at Tucker as well,” he said. “It would be unfair to allow it for some but not for others.”

Board member Alicia Atkins (Varina District) also opposed the proposal, pointing out that allowing opt-in and grandfathering in this scenario would mean that HCPS would need to continue to offer it to families during larger, divisionwide redistricting. 

She also raised concerns about what opt-in and grandfathering would mean for school bus routes. Under the proposal, students who opted-in would have to find their own transportation or use the division’s “HUB” bus system, but grandfathered students may be provided a traditional school bus route despite the boundary changes. 

“Especially with something like grandfathering and opt-in, what does that mean for transportation?” Atkins said. “What does that mean for the bus route that has that one student across town that needs to be picked up?”

Several families also have spoken out against the proposal on the school board’s online public forum, including HCPS parent Jennifer Lumpkin, whose seventh grade daughter would be impacted by the Freeman-Godwin proposal.

“We moved to this school district specifically in November 2022 in order for my son (and my daughter, who is in seventh grade) to attend Freeman High School,” she wrote. “When families purchase homes to allow their child to attend a particular school, they should be grandfathered into the home school district for the remainder of their schooling.”

‘It is a bigger conversation’

School overcrowding is not a new issue for Henrico Schools, and is not just an issue for only Freeman High, said board member Kristi Kinsella (Brookland District), but for many schools in the West End.

“I know some study halls in some schools, for example Tucker, exceed 100 students,” she said. “Core classes in Deep Run [High], Glen Allen [High], Freeman, Godwin, and Tucker are in the mid- to upper-30s – and those are core instructional classes.”

A broader, division-wide school redistricting is also likely on the horizon. The last division-wide boundary change process was in 2010, since the redistricting process scheduled in 2020 had to be halted due to COVID.

Some overcrowding may be alleviated once the top floor of Hermitage High School’s new ACE Center opens to accommodate 400 more students and once Henrico High School opens its new cybersecurity program – both happening within the next two years.

But school redistricting will most likely be unavoidable in the near future, board members said. Until then, it may not be necessary to make adjustments to certain schools, said Irving.

“I think that looking at this, it is a bigger conversation than just two particular moves at this time,” he said. “I also think that this conversation is larger and there can be options that we can learn about that are not physically moving kids to schools that’s not their choice.”

But Shea continued to urge other board members to consider the proposal. 

“They are limited in scope and they are pocket adjustments, and I think that we can do this in the lens of what’s to come and not create that flip-flop we talked about earlier by moving too many people,” she said. “To be clear, I think generous grandfathering in this scenario is not picking favorites, I think it’s doing what’s right by students and families to limit disruption but to still be able to balance capacity.”

Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Her position is dependent upon reader support; make a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.