Orange County has historically been a high-growth area with hundreds of families moving into the area every week. Today, much of the growth in Orange County is in our area.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
To\u00a0determine\u00a0new schools, the district looks at development plans in each municipality and makes projections of future school enrollment based on that development.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
There is an advanced planning group that reviews this data each year and adjusts or makes changes to the 10-year capital plan accordingly. This is why, two years ago, four new schools were placed in the plan for the Apopka area.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since then, the\u00a0Legislature expanded school choice laws that allow any parent to apply for and be granted funding to use for an education choice outside of public schools. With that change, combined with lower birth rates and stricter immigration enforcement, our local schools have seen a dramatic decrease in enrollment.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The effect that it has on future capital planning cannot be understated. We can no longer look at\u00a0a future\u00a0development and assume that it will produce a certain number of\u00a0public school\u00a0children, since we\u00a0can\u00a0no longer\u00a0project\u00a0where those parents will send their children to school\u00a0\u2014\u202for whether they will have children at all.\u00a0(The U.S. birth rate has fallen to 1.6 children\u00a0per woman, well below the 2.1 level\u00a0required\u00a0to\u00a0maintain\u00a0population.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
The result of declining enrollment has resulted in the district making a big shift in future building needs. The 10-year capital plan this year\u00a0changed,\u00a0and\u00a0almost all\u00a0new schools were moved outside the 10-year window, except for two new schools, both\u00a0locatedin Apopka.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those two schools will relieve a couple of elementary schools and Wolf Lake Middle as they are the only ones\u00a0currently\u00a0needing relief. The biggest change is that the\u00a0relief\u00a0high school is no longer in the 10-year plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Apopka High School has not met its projected growth, despite significant new residential development in the area. The school has not grown in six years and currently has 120 fewer students than it did in 2021\u201322, including a decline of 45 students just this past year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Again, we assumed that new residential development would mean more students, as it always has in the past. This is no longer true. For whatever reason\u00a0\u2014\u00a0more private schools in the area, more homeschooling, more virtual options, more charter schools\u2014\u202fthe new growth is not producing more students at Apopka High School.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Plus, with a new K-12 charter school coming to the Wyld Oaks area,\u00a0we\u2019ll\u00a0experience fewer students\u00a0\u2014\u00a0not more\u00a0\u2014\u00a0in most Apopka public schools, even as houses continue to be built.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Besides building fewer new schools, the district\u00a0has to\u00a0look at current schools and\u00a0make adjustments to\u00a0use available space more efficiently because another new law allows charter schools to be given access to open space in traditional public schools. That, combined with the financial burden that underenrolled schools put on the district, resulted in the district\u00a0consolidating\u00a0seven schools this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Apopka, there were a couple of small, targeted shifts recently in which neighborhoods split between different schools were rezoned to the same school. This moved 16 middle school students and 92 elementary students into schools that had extra room.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was not a major\u00a0rezoning, as was incorrectly\u00a0stated\u00a0on social media.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
We will probably begin to see other changes like this to maximize available space in\u00a0all of\u00a0our current traditional public schools in the future.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0a challenging time for planning and maximizing resources, but all these decisions are made thoughtfully.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Melissa](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Byrd_Web_1745418963-e1767899592414.jpg\")
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Melissa Byrd represents District 7 on the Orange County School Board. She has previously taught at Forest City Elementary and Pace Brantley Hall School, served as PTSA vice president and chair of the School Advisory Council at Piedmont Lakes Middle, and volunteered at Clay Springs Elementary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As we have discussed the budget landscape over the last few weeks, we\u00a0mainly focused\u00a0on the operational budget. This…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235862,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[139,141,140],"class_list":["post-279084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}