Morningside Parents Circulate Petition, Launch Rezoning Webpage

Seventh-grader Andrew Bradburn is able to walk or ride his bike to from his parents' house in Morningside.

But as soon as next year, Bradburn and other students from Morningside may be walking to a bus stop instead of a schoolhouse.

In all four Atlanta Public Schools , the Morningside Lenox Park neighborhood is zoned out of the Grady High School cluster into the new North Atlanta High School. The middle school students would go to a proposed new Mid-town Middle School in Buckhead.

Morningside they say they helped build into schools of excellence. A group of parents started a petition this week to keep zoned for the Grady cluster.

"It’s very important to stay in my neighborhood and at my neighborhood schools, not shipped across town on a bus," Larissa Bradburn, Andrew’s mom, said.

The petition, “Keep Morningside with Inman and Grady,” has been online for less than 48-hours and has more than 450 signatures.

Morningside resident Evelyn Edmeades, one of the authors of the petition, said she and other parents came together to give the neighborhood a voice in the rezoning conversation.

In the petition, the group notes that the demographers hired by Atlanta Public Schools "violate" four of the five criteria set by the demographers themselves: attempt to assign students closest to their homes; attempt to avoid splitting neighborhoods; ensure student safety and transportation efficiency by using major geographic features as boundaries; attempt to maximize/keep feeder concept intact.

In the proposed options, part of Morningside is rezoned to "more distant elementary schools," the parents wrote. Middle school students are "sent several miles across major geographic boundaries to a new middle school" and high school students are bused 10-miles away to the North Atlanta High School.

“Distant busing outside neighborhoods violates four of the five criteria set out by the demographers,” Edmeades and others wrote in the petition.

Edmeades said parents continue to push for signatures on the petition and are distributing flyers to get the message out to neighbors without children in the school system.

“This is really just about keeping us in the Inman and Grady cluster” she said. “Virginia-Highland and Morningside, I consider them one.”

Most Virginia-Highland and Morningside residents agree with Edmeades, and that ask the school system to keep the neighborhood together.

For more, visit the MES Rezoning Info website.

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