Over the past eight months, Atlanta Public Schools (APS) has been taking intentional action to ensure our school system structure best supports the needs of our students. Since the Board of Education (BOE) hired Superintendent Dr. Bryan Johnson, he has been leading the work to reduce costs and readjust our school footprint so funding and resources are tied to what impacts student growth and provides strong and accessible programmatic offerings for all APS students. This work is long-overdue, with our system continuing to try and maintain and staff buildings designed to hold 70,000 students, creating under-capacity schools for our 50,000 students today (a number that has been steadily declining).
Due to under-capacity schools and imbalance in school populations, resources and funding is spread too thin contributing to inequities in high-quality instruction and programming from elementary to high school. Too much money is being spent on bricks and mortar, deferred maintenance, and things like inefficient transportation routes, which do not have the most impact on student outcomes. Additionally, this spread-out structure has created an over-sized central office to maintain it, which is where Dr. Johnson and his team started cutting, reducing the Center for Learning and Leadership (CLL) – Central Office by 135 positions and taking additional measures to find $70 million in savings. This helped address our $100 million budget deficit for 2026, but another $55 million looms for 2027. More was needed to position us in the long term to best support the educational needs of our students, which is why APS embarked on the Comprehensive Facilities Master Planning (CFMP) process.
CFMP process picked up and reset the facilities planning work the district has been trying to do for years. This time it was led by HPM’s (private contractor in charge) facilities planning consulting team and APS staff who worked directly with a task force comprised of school and community representatives, who they met with regularly. They also held 50 school community meetings, received 7,600 responses from several surveys, answered 600 questions through APS’ Let’s Talk portal, and saw 30,000 visits to the CFMP website. This district-led engagement does not include meetings individual board members attended and held and the hundreds of conversations had to receive feedback directly from parents, families, staff, and the community. These are extremely difficult conversations and decisions, and the BOE and district staff were acutely sensitive and responsive to the input received and shared which helped shape the scenarios as they evolved.
The final recommendation, which was unanimously approved by the Board on December 3, is the repurposing of 16 schools throughout the district, and for the Jackson Cluster, Dunbar Elementary and Toomer Annex (currently Whitefoord Early Learning Center) will be closed and repurposed. Dunbar students will join with other Jackson Cluster elementary schools, and the Dunbar Elementary School facility must be reactivated for a use connected to the needs of the Dunbar and Mechanicsville community with their input and support. Pre-K classes
from the Toomer Annex will be added to other schools with more changes to come to increase Pre-K classes throughout the system.
These facility shifts and others will free up $25 million in operation costs annually and reduce deferred maintenance by $66 million that the district can then invest back into our students in ways aligned with our priorities identified in our goals and strategic plan: improving outcomes in literacy, numeracy proficiency, and college and career readiness.
To this end, APS has begun visioning sessions to share the proposed direction and get community feedback on specific initiatives to increase literacy and improve quality and access to middle and high school programming. This includes a district-wide School of the Arts and full Early College High School at the Carver campus, a biomedical and healthcare sciences pathway at Washington High School in partnership with Morehouse School of Medicine and 3DE, a Junior Achievement program at South Atlanta High School. There is also a focus on expanding Career, Technical & Agricultural Education (CTAE) pathways, which have been growing through Atlanta College and Career Academy (ACCA) located in the Pittsburgh neighborhood. While these are renewed pathways that will be aligned with current day needs, they also tie back to programs that were strong at these high schools with proven success, which helps tie what has worked well to what is needed as we build APS for the future.
What comes next, particularly for the Maynard Jackson Cluster?
Now that there is a plan for facilities, APS must work to create balance among school populations through rezoning, which for Jackson will affect Barack and Michelle Obama Academy (BAMOA), Benteen, and Parkside, with the addition of Dunbar students. This work is tentatively scheduled to begin in spring of 2026 and run through fall of 2026, with the BOE voting in the fall and changes implemented by school year 2027-2028. Additionally, there are proposed additions to both King Middle School and Maynard Jackson High School as a part of the plan. Those additions and the amount will be determined as a part of the Education Special Local Option Sales Tax (ESLOST) planning work, which thanks to the comprehensive facilities plan, will align construction funding with our priority needs, starting with programmatic development needs at Carver and Washington. Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (ESLPOST) planning begins in January 2026 and will include community engagement in the spring of 2026, with the BOE voting on the plan in June 2026, in time for it to go to the voters for final approval.
To learn more, follow the planning progress, and get engaged, please visit https://atlantapublicschools.us/aps2040. Community input is vital to this process so please stay informed and share your feedback!
Katie Howard is a District Atlanta Public School Board Member from the Porch Press area.
