OCALA, FL (352today.com) – An item for a resolution on the Marion County Public School Board‘s agenda to form an attendance advisory board committee will be voted on at the MCPS Board meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025, to address efficient utilization of facilities across the school district.

Among the school district’s objectives are making sure that they have efficient utilization of capacity of the elementary schools in the northern part of Marion County and extending that efficient utilization to schools across the district. Decreasing operational costs, looking at that fiscal responsibility and ensuring the school district’s future regardless of what funding challenges may come in the future is also a key step in optimizing the district’s, said Marion County Public Schools Deputy Superintendent Ben Whitehouse.

Making the best use of the current facilities

The school district must also make sure that they are providing for the needs of students in the north end, and at a greater scale for all of its students. There’s also the challenge of the alternative students at Bridgeway Academy and trying to find an improved facility for them to use.

According to the statutory requirements regarding efficient utilization, the school board has a responsibility to make sure that they’re demonstrating the utilization of their school capacity at its best, and with the school district work plan that’s submitted to the state every year, the school district has identified options for what they will be able to do to make sure that they’re utilizing their facilities efficiently, said Whithouse. One of those options included redistricting.

“Because we know we have available capacity in the northern part of Marion County, we want to propose looking at rezoning those schools as a way that we can address those capacity issues,” said Whitehouse. “The schools we started looking at for this conversation internally are Anthony, Fessenden, Oak Crest, Ocala Springs, Reddick and Sparr. We know from that group, Anthony, Oak Crest and Reddick are all under enrollment, Fessenden is pretty near capacity, and Ocala Springs is well over capacity at 120 percent and Sparr Elementary is just over capacity as well.”

The best interests of students 

When Evergreen Elementary School closed in 2021, students were dispersed to higher performing schools. In closing a consistently low performing school, the school district had to ensure the students were sent to higher performing schools. However, the timeline for that has now expired, said Whitehouse.

“We can begin looking at rezoning those students,” said Whitehouse. “Part of what we to do in making sure we’re providing the best education for our students is limiting the amount of time students ride on buses. We know that impacts our students’ day the longer they have to ride on the bus, and fiscally makes it much more manageable for us, with the less long distance traveling the district has to do.”

Reddick-Collier Elementary is the most challenged school in terms of utilization. If all of the elementary schools in the north end were added collectively together and compared to the Florida Inventory of School Houses (FISH)–data that the school district has available across all of those schools, and the total number of students enrolled across all of those schools–they’re at 82 percent utilization for those six schools, said Whitehouse.

That percentage would allow for some future influx of students while still ensuring the school district is using the majority of the capacity, said Whitehouse.

Committee creation 

The school district would create an attendance boundary advisory committee, which is a concept that a lot of the school districts in the south part of Florida have used for some time as they have been faced with the challenge of redistricting schools, said Whitehouse. However, the school district is now at the point where they need to have annual conversations about redistricting.

“The goal of this advisory committee would be to review each year, the attendance boundary of all of our schools. elementary, middle and high school, across the district, looking at the utilization of district facilities across the district and make recommendations to the superintendent each year about what changes need to be made to try to balance out the school district’s population,” said Whitehouse.

Members of the advisory board would include parents, teachers, other stake holders, similar to some of the other oversight committees, they would provide some community input, and it will be a community input decision.

“We’re all coming together to look at what’s best for our students and making recommendations based on that,” said Whitehouse.

If the board approves the resolution for the committee, the school district can begin the process immediately.

Advisory committee makeup

The makeup of the advisory committee would be:

  • A nominee from each School Board Member
  • One nominee by the Superintendent
  • One nominee by the Public Education Foundation of Marion County
  • One nominee by the Ocala Metro Chamber and Economic Partnership
  • One nominee by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
  • One nominee by the Exceptional Student Education Director
  • One nominee by the Hispanic Business Council of Ocala
  • One nominee by the Land Development Industry
  • One nominee by the County Commission

Collective effort

All of the school district staff will be available to the committee to provide input, share data and share information, help guide the conversation and answer questions they have, so the committee can ultimately come back with a recommendation, said Whitehouse.

“If we move forward with this, a potential timeline for rezoning, we would like to after this vote start having some of those attendance advisory committee meetings in the months of November and December to start looking primarily at the north end schools because that’s our first challenge, and then beyond that, we can certainly branch out beyond those schools.” said Whitehouse. “We can look at a work session in December or possibly January at the latest to discuss those committee recommendations, and then in January through March start having those community meetings where it would be necessary to gather input any time we do an attendance zone change, we want to make sure that we’re gathering community input.”

March through April would be the rule development process, and the rule making public hearing, which would allow the school district to get information out to parents before the end of the school year, if changes are made, so they know heading into the school year, what school it will be. This will also require a significant amount of work on the back end to update all of the road files in Skyward, the actual address in the student system to say which school it’s now zoned for, which is a labor-intensive effort. Busing changes for the school district’s transportation department would also factor into that.

The goal would be parent and student notification by May for any of these impacted schools, said Whitehouse.