HENRICO COUNTY, Va. β Some Maybeury Elementary School parents are pushing back against a Henrico County School Board redistricting proposal that would send their younger children to a different middle school than they expected when they bought their homes.
The proposal would move the entire Maybeury Elementary School community from Tuckahoe Middle to Quioccasin Middle School, which is getting a new building in 2027.
The schools sit only 1.5 miles apart in Henrico's West End.
Hannah Kenyon and Molly Ratliff, who have older children at Tuckahoe and younger children at Maybeury Elementary, said they anticipated their younger children would attend Tuckahoe Middle too.
"It just doesn't make any sense," Ratliff said.
"It is our community already. Quioccasin, it's just not our community," Kenyon said.
The redistricting would also impact the entire Skipwith Elementary community, which would switch from Quioccasin to Tuckahoe Middle. Portions of Jackson Davis, Colonial Trail and Carver elementary schools are also affected.
Henrico County School Board Chair Marcie Shea said the potential changes makes sense when looking at a map.
"The main driver for this consideration was feeder patterns and community continuity," Shea said. "Looking at the fact that Quioccasin breaks between three high schools, and then also Tucker High School, which has feeders coming from both of these middle schools. Tucker comes from five middle schools without a majority coming from anywhere. And so that's also part of what's being looked at here, in the broader sense of feeder patterns."
Kenyon argued that's not a strong enough reason to rezone families to a different middle school.
"My children don't do transitions particularly well as a result of their ADHD and some of their other challenges, so the ability for the guidance teams to work together to transition children like mine, and really all kids but particularly focus on kids with 504s and IEPs, and ESL kids, particularly children who need a lot of support, I'm very concerned their transition will be unsuccessful," Kenyon said.
A group of families including Kenyon and Ratliff started a petition that now has over 1,000 signatures to try to stop the proposal.
"The feedback has been overwhelming negative," Ratliff said about the rezoning proposal.
Shea contradicted that and said the school board has heard a variety of perspectives.
"We're listening to communities that are able to turn out loud and with lots of petitions, but we also are listening to communities that aren't able to turn out with that volume, but their opinions and their thoughts and their feelings still matter," Shea said. "So for all the proposals still left on the table, we have communities on both sides that oppose and communities that support."
Everything remains in draft form.
The school board could opt to drop this particular portion of the proposal, something these parents say they will continue to fight for.
"I appreciate that there is some perception that the Maybeury community is only concerned about ourselves, that is actually not the case. Most of us are in public schools because we are products of public schools ourselves, because we feel very strongly the public school system benefits the entire community, and we look at this proposal and we see all negatives and no positive and none have been provided to us by the school system," Kenyon said.
At Thursday's October 9th school board meeting, the board will evaluate the rezoning proposals with new 2025-2026 school year student enrollment counts. The Maybeury families CBS6 spoke to said they wish the board had those numbers before making its rezoning proposals.
CBS 6 is committed to sharing community voices on this important topic. Email your thoughts to the CBS 6 Newsroom.
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