New high school zones for Central, Benton will drastically change up sports teams starting this fall
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (KQTV) -- With Lafayette High School becoming a middle school this coming fall, the athletic teams at both Central and Benton High School will look a lot different next semester due to the new school zones put in place.
Changing the school zones has been a topic of conversation for the last few years with the St. Joseph School District, but this year it's finally going into place.
Shannon Nolte, director of student services for the St. Joseph School District, said the district tried to make these zone lines as fair as possible to even out the student populations at the two schools.
"Dividing north side of the city and the south side of the city, Central's in the middle, so you're going to have some students that are probably pretty close to Central that would be going to Benton. But that line again, that line had to be somewhere, usually it was driven on basically the numbers," said Nolte. "It was really like 'okay, we make this line go here,' 'okay, that's gonna give us the student population,' and so when we do that, we're able to identify those numbers that fit in those buildings."
The new school zones will change up the sports teams at Central and Benton, with familiar faces of former Lafayette athletes now playing in new places.
With spring sports in their final weeks and Lafayette in its last semester, the roster differences probably won't be available until the summer
"We've been issued a list of kids that are in our geographic boundaries, and coaches have the ability to contact those kids or at least start to contact those kids to get information to them about open gyms and things like that, to where we have sent brochures just to make sure that that information gets out," said Benton Athletic Director Brett Goodwin. "So we've had a few open gyms. I know Coach (Mark) Cole has had some morning workouts with football and has had a few kids show up. So we're slowly starting to see some kids come around. But with so many kids playing spring sports right now, you're not going to have that perfect number until you probably roll into the summer and then maybe not even until you get into fall practices in August."
As far as maintaining the new zone lines, SJSD said there's a system in place to prevent kids from transferring back and forth.
"We have a process that, if they are in a district, they can be transferred for certain reasons. They will follow that policy, and by that policy, students that are in that boundary will stay in that boundary," said Nolte. "There are some exceptions that get made for certain accommodations. There's status of a student in their education, or if they're placed in a school specifically for programming. Then, by administrative decision, of course, they may go outside of their boundary where they live."
Nolte said SJSD is monitoring and evaluating several transfer requests currently.
He understands not everyone in the community is the happiest about the changes, but he said they will be good for St. Joseph in the long run.
"Students are resilient, and they even talk to each other more these days in different schools than they used to," said Nolte. "But they will adjust to that. I think there'll be some cool partnerships that come out of this. There'll be some different-looking teams athletically, and that won't hurt us any."
