Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) announced a new timeline for its comprehensive rezoning plan on Monday. Though the new schedule has pushed back the timeline by about a month, the plan will still be adopted by the end of 2023 and take effect in the 2024-25 school year. 

The new timeline allows the School Board of Alachua County to consider a revised rezoning proposal, generated with the current semester’s enrollment figures. The previous plan was built on enrollment numbers from February. 

“It was a matter of the extra few weeks that it will give us to be able to process those new numbers and turn them into a revised map, without having really any impact at all on the rezoning process,” District spokeswoman Jackie Johnson said in a phone interview. “It just seemed like a no brainer.” 

Johnson said the administrative staff hopes to have a revised map ready to present at the two community input sessions scheduled for Oct. 2. 

The amended timeline places the first reading of the new rezoning plan at the school board’s Oct. 17 meeting. The board is to host a public hearing on Nov. 14 to hear more citizen input, and the final vote on district rezoning is scheduled for Dec. 5. 

In the time leading up to the first reading, the district will host multiple community input sessions. There were already three input sessions scheduled for October, which would have occurred after the first reading in the original timeline.  

In addition to those three, the district has rescheduled two other community input sessions that were postponed due to Hurricane Idalia. There will be a session at Kanapaha Middle School on Oct. 2 at 5:30 p.m., and one at Santa Fe High School on Oct. 12 at 5:30 p.m. 

The other October community input sessions are as follows: 

• 1 p.m. on Oct. 2 at SWAG Resource Center  
• 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 5 at Newberry High School Auditorium  
• 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 10, at Gainesville High School Auditorium 

The district will continue updating its rezoning website with timeline changes, new proposed maps and other information as it becomes available.