The DeKalb County School District is overhauling its Student Assignment Project that was initially slated to close dozens of schools.
The overhaul, first discussed at the Student Assignment Project Committee meeting on April 29 and reported by Decaturish on April 30, received an official district announcement on May 5. The project will now focus on cluster-based community engagement.
The decision follows more than 10,000 community feedback submissions, with the majority of submissions opposing school closures.
The closure and redistricting effort is due to a significant enrollment decline seen broadly across metro Atlanta. With 110,000 seats and about 90,000 students, the district is trying to become more fiscally efficient by balancing buildings, boundaries and programs.
“We learned that the process felt too top-down,” Sauce said in a video update about the SAP process. “We learned that the student experience was not enough at the forefront of the conversation. We learned that the scenarios felt predetermined and that it didn’t make sense to separate buildings from boundaries, boundaries from programs.”
Sauce said that, moving forward, all these conversations will take place through community-based action groups. Sauce also emphasized that the “student experience” will play a greater role in decision-making, rather than focusing primarily on buildings and numbers.
Next steps
The new approach will proceed in phases rather than addressing the entire district at once. In a joint meeting between DCSD and the DeKalb Board of Commissioners on May 4, Sauce said the district would not have the capacity to conduct 22 cluster-specific conversations simultaneously.
“We recognize the need to move in a tiered-phase manner,” Sauce said at the meeting. “We can’t do all of this at once and do so effectively at the level that our community is telling us that they expect and desire, rightfully so.”
The approach will focus on cluster-based action groups. The district will issue a competitive request for proposals (RFP) to hire a community facilitation firm to help conduct these group discussions in the future.
In fall 2026, the district will focus first on setting attendance boundaries for new or newly renovated schools, including Dresden Elementary, Idlewood Elementary, Sequoyah Middle and High and Cross Keys High School.
These schools are set to open from 2027 to 2029, so the district will adjust to accommodate them and prioritize creating a Sequoyah cluster. The final recommendation would be presented to the board for approval in December 2026.
Attendance clusters will require evaluation during this step, which means several clusters could be affected, including Chamblee, Cross Keys, Dunwoody, Druid Hills, Lakeside and Tucker.
In the next phase, scheduled for spring 2027, the district will turn to addressing under-enrollment in the following clusters: Towers, Columbia, McNair, Cedar Grove, Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) and Miller Grove. All of these clusters are located in south DeKalb.
No decisions have been made through the project so far, and the Student Assignment Project will “continue to evolve with the active involvement of committee members and ongoing community engagement at its core,” according to the May 5 announcement.
Sauce said the district will provide more details about community involvement opportunities before the upcoming school year and encouraged residents to stay engaged as the process continues.
This story was provided by WABE media partner Decaturish.
