Stafford School Board Selects High School Redistricting Plan
Board also receives a report on the transportation issues that disrupted the start of the school year.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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The Stafford School Board on Tuesday approved a high school redistricting plan to go into effect in August of 2026, when the county’s sixth high school is scheduled to open.
The board had been considering five scenarios and chose the one known as F1 by a vote of 6-to-1, with Rock Hill district representative Patricia Healy voting against it.
Division-wide redistricting at the high school level is necessary to fill the new high school and decompress the five existing high schools.
After redistricting under the selected plan, North Stafford High School will be at 75% capacity, as compared to 105% capacity without the new school and the new boundary zones. Brooke Point will go from estimated 108% capacity to 86%; Stafford High School from 108% to 88%; Colonial Forge from 98% to 95%; and Mountain View from 99% to 94%.
High school #6, which has yet to be named, will open at 79% capacity under the selected plan. There will be no senior class the first year.
Students who will be seniors in August of 2026 and will be redistricted to a new high school will have the option to go to the new school or stay at their old school.
Board members said they chose scenario F1 because it keeps Mountain View—which is in a part of the county that is not expected to grow as much as the rest of Stafford—as full as possible and reduces pressure on the other schools, especially North Stafford, the oldest and smallest high school.
Maya Guy—the Aquia district representative who was reelected on Tuesday to serve as Vice Chair for 2025—said her focus was on keeping enrollment at Brooke Point High School from exploding. By August of 2026 there will be two other schools—Stafford Middle School and elementary school #19, which is under construction—sharing a campus with Brooke Point.
“I will be loud about protecting Aquia families,” said Guy, noting that she wasn’t happy with the decision to put elementary school #19 at Brooke Point. “There are people who live behind Brooke Point. I’m going to vote [for the plan] that’s going to put [fewer] bodies at Brooke Point.”
Healy said she could not support scenario F1 because the division’s transportation department ranked it third out of the five in terms of its impact on the transportation system.
According to projections from the division’s planning department, the redistricting will keep enrollment at the six high schools below capacity through 2029, but by 2032, Brooke Point and Colonial Forge will again be over capacity, at 101% and 106%, respectively.
“The most important thing is to build the relationships [with the Board of Supervisors] and keep the conversations going, knowing what these numbers look like in 2032, only six years after high school #6 opens,” said Maureen Siegmund, who was reelected as Board Chair for 2025. “Almost immediately, we’ll need to begin conversations about high school #7, knowing these numbers.”
Report from Transportation Advisory Services
Also at Tuesday’s meeting, the board heard a report from Transportation Advisory Services, an independent, third-party consulting firm hired to analyze the causes of the significant transportation problems that plagued the beginning of the school year.
Approximately 3,000 students, or 10% of the student population, did not have assigned bus routes the day before school was to start.
Consultant Chris Wojciechowski said the root causes of the breakdown were changes to the structure of the transportation department, which left staff unclear about their roles and responsibilities; new routing software that was implemented too quickly without the involvement of the school division’s technology team; inadequate training on new processes and procedures; and poor planning for the use of “hub bus stops” or “transfer stations” for students.
Wojciechowski said that in late 2023, the transportation department was looking at either having to upgrade its existing routing software or purchasing new software. Both represented a financial commitment, he said.
Ideally, Wojciechowski said, the division’s technology team would have been involved in helping to plan and execute whatever decision was made, but “the tech team was not really seen as an asset.”
In April of 2024, there was a “drop dead” point at which the department had to decide whether to move to the new system or go back to the old system.
“There was a time when that decision had to be made and the decision was made to move forward,” Wojciechowski said. “I think there was a lot of pressure to get this software up and running, since there was a commitment financially to moving towards this software.”
He said there were “a lot of unrealistic timelines in implementing the software” that the tech team could have prevented, if they had been brought onboard.
TAS recommends that going forward, the transportation department work to establish excellent communication and create a culture of “accountability from the top down.” There needs to be “thorough testing and training for new software,” partnership with the division’s tech team, and an “opt-in” model for transportation,
“This is not sending one email to parents. This needs to be a constant bombardment of communication,” Wojciechowski said. “When families do not respond, you need to be proactive as a district as a whole to get response from all of these students, and a focus on students who would have the largest impact on the route.”
Wojciechowski said he does not believe more staff is needed in the transportation department to implement these recommendations.
“I think the staff you have is capable of working,” he said. “I don’t think adding to the head count will solve these problems. Having a good culture over there would have prevented these issues.”
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