The Brownwood ISD Board of Trustees unanimously approved Project Neighborhood during Monday night’s meeting, which will realign Brownwood ISD primary campuses to provide services from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade within neighborhood elementaries.

The changes move Head Start (pre-kindergarten) onto four elementary campuses including Coggin Intermediate School. Coggin will become a full neighborhood elementary school offering grades from Pre-K through sixth grade. East, Northwest, and Woodland Heights elementary schools will house Pre-K to fifth grade, beginning in the 2022-23 school year. Pre-K will also expand to include 3–year-olds along with 4-year-olds.

“We’ve been having this discussion for over three years, and the best way to get our Pre-K through sixth grade campus configuration to maximize our student achievement,” said Brownwood ISD Superintendent Dr. Joe Young.

Estimated enrollments between this school year and next for the four campuses are as follows:

• Woodland Heights (432 this year to 438 next)
• Northwest (500 this year to 446)
• East (302 this year to 293)
• Coggin (704 this year to 702)

Those numbers do not include transfers from outside the district, which is expected to be 40 to 50 students.

“The computer program that helped us draw those zones did a good job of helping us get the right number of kids,” Young said. “We wanted to be sure we were able to house at each those campuses the correct number of teachers and students.”

To find out which campus your child will attend for the 2022-23 school year, check the map above or click the following link and enter your home address: www.brownwoodisd.org/elemzones

For parents interested in transferring their children back to the elementary he or she previously attended, the Priority 1 window is April 1-15.

“If you put in a transfer and you have a legitimate transfer reason, if it’s something that is best for the kids, we are going to give our best effort to make that happen,” Young said. “If that means we have to create another class or move a teacher from one campus to another for a year, we will still do that April 1-15. After April 15, we will do that as space allows. It will be back to the transfer policy we have now, which is you can request a transfer anywhere within our district, but you can’t go if there’s no space. And after April 15, we won’t move teachers around.

“Our whole intent for Project Neighborhood is to allow students to remain on a campus for an extended period of time with the same group of teachers and administrators for as long as possible. If a student has been at an elementary for four years, now the map has them zoned to another, that doesn’t really fit our intention. If those students elect to stay at the elementary they were at, then we’re going to try and make that happen so that they can stay there for the longest amount of time.”