FHSD will be implementing a soft boundary change starting next school year. For the FHN Community, this means some students will move from Fairmount Elementary’s boundary to Central Elementary’s. For students, like Hollenbeck eighth graders Julianna Latham and Evana Vrhovac, it means attending FHC instead of FHN and going into a new school without the majority of their friends, which can be is intimidating.

“I would say, [my biggest concern is] not knowing as many people and like I kind of knew, from [my] sisters who went to North, more stuff about it,” Latham said. “I never really heard much about Central because I never knew that many people that went there.”

According to FHSD, the changes implemented are to shift students out of Warren and Fairmount Elementary, which are over capacity and put in place to create long term solutions to this concern. Boundaries —like the one between FHC and FHN— were redrawn to create cleaner paths for students when transitioning between schools.

“We look at the type of housing that’s going in,” FHSD Director of Human Resources Mark Delaney said. “So for instance, right now in Cottleville, there’s a new population of homes going in, but from the design of the homes, we understand [that they] are geared towards people 55 and older, so we don’t anticipate many students coming out of that new subdivision.”

Rather than moving all students from one school to another, FHSD uses a soft boundary change to allow affected families more flexibility with schools. Students are allowed to finish at their current school and not change their next school if they have an older sibling that would attend with them, preventing families from having children at two schools of the same level.

“It’s designed to kind of ease some of the challenges with [moving schools],” Delaney said. “Moving someone instantly, but giving them the opportunity to either finish out there or make the choice to go to the new school within the new boundaries.”