As your liaison to the Buckhead Council of Neighborhoods (BCN) and UHNA Vice President, I want to provide a summary of recent activities you should be aware of which deals with the ongoing APS Redistricting Plan and impacts on our neighbors. – Beau Grant
The Atlanta Public Schools (APS) Board continues moving forward with their “APS Forward 2040” plan.
APS produced this overview video published on Youtube to explain the plans: APS Forward 2040: Reshaping the Future of Education
With the Board’s vote on December 3, 2025, the APS Forward 2040 plan has selected Scenario Three, and the “Scenario Phase” has now effectively ended, which renders Scenarios One and Two defunct. If you will recall, Scenario One largely kept the current structures, but tweaked district boundaries. It was ruled out because it failed to generate the necessary operational savings or significantly reduce the thousands of “empty seats” across the district. Scenario Two invoked some campus mergers but left many dual-campus arrangements intact, essentially serving only as a “half-measure” that would lead to yet another painful redistricting process in 5–7 years.
- Scenario Three will pivot from the current “dual-campus” model where students attend one campus for early grades and another for later elementary grades. Scenario Three proposes a more ‘localized’, K-8 structure for certain parts of Buckhead. (IMHO, it seems like APS is simply returning to the way things were organized back in the 1980s.) APS chose this path primarily to reduce operational costs. Maintaining “split” campuses for a single school doubles the administrative and facility overhead. By converting the 6th Grade Academy into a K–8 school, APS can dissolve multiple dual-campus arrangements across Buckhead, saving millions of tax dollars, money they claim will be reinvested into classroom instruction.
APS made no mention of plans to use these anticipated millions of dollars of savings to reduce the tax burdens shouldered by Community Members.
The Core Changes in Scenario Three:- APS will move away from the current model where elementary schools like Jackson and Sarah Smith split students between “Primary” and “Main” campii/buildings.
- The Powers Ferry Campus, currently the Sutton 6th Grade Academy, will be converted into a new K–8 neighborhood school. (This campus was formerly Dykes High School, and then Sutton Middle School when Northside High School was still in existence at the Northside Parkway campus where Sutton ‘mostly’ now operates.)
- Both the Warren T. Jackson Primary and Sarah Smith Primary campuses would be repurposed, potentially for early childhood centers or professional learning.
- Under Scenario Three, E. Rivers Elementary is not slated for repurposing or closure, but it could experience significant “downstream” and “upstream” effects. To make the K-8 model work at the old Sutton 6th grade campus, APS would likely need to “draw from” neighboring zones to fill those seats. This creates a high probability of boundary shifts for E. Rivers. Which has hovered near 100% capacity for years. Scenario Three’s broader goal is “balancing utilization,” which could involve moving some blocks currently zoned for E. Rivers into the new K-8 zone or adjacent elementary zones to relieve the pressure on our building. Unlike Jackson or Sarah Smith, E. Rivers would remain a traditional K-5 neighborhood school, which many parents prefer for safety and age-appropriate learning environments.
By consolidating ALL of Sutton Middle School into the Northside Parkway Campus to create a traditional 6th–8th grade middle school, Sutton faces the most radical change under Scenario Three. If the Powers Ferry campus becomes a K-8 school, Sutton on Northside Drive would need to absorb approximately 350 additional students to accommodate the consolidated 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. The current model where all 6th graders in the cluster spend one year together at the Powers Ferry campus would end, breaking the so-called “North Atlanta” identity—where every child in the cluster eventually goes to school together starting in 6th grade, with some students remaining in their K-8 “neighborhood hub” until high school, and other students transitioning to the larger Sutton Middle School.