The district also says the new plan will postpone the need for portable classrooms and save about a million dollars.
Report from earlier Thursday
A group of parents in Fort Bend Co. are fighting plans to rezone a local school district. For some of them, it could mean their children would be forced to attend schools farther away from where they now go to school.
Parents voiced their concerns at a Thursday night meeting at the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District building. Many parents, including some picking up students from Foster High School, do not support the rezoning.
"We just feel like they've turned a deaf ear to it, and not listening to us," parent Don McGee said. "Our biggest concern is for the education of our children."
If approved, the rezoning plan will students from neighborhoods along the FM 359 corridor -- like Pecan Grove, Rio Vista, River's Edge and Plantation Place -- and moves them from Foster to Lamar High School.
It's only a difference of a mile, but parents said they'd have to cross through nearly a dozen intersections more to get to Lamar and pass over heavily traveled train tracks to get to the school. They said that it is not only a safety issue, but an issue of community: They voted for the bond that allowed Foster High School to be built and expected that one day their kids would use it.
"It's not about the fact that we don't want to go down there and live life down there, it's that we don't live there," said parent Greg Berry. "We live life here in this community."
A spokesperson for LCISD said the decision to rezone the district "was difficult. It's a hard decision."
They added that shifting the student population is necessary to maximize long term facility use and to limit overcrowding.
Rezoning is necessary because of George Ranch High School, new high school that is opening this fall that will take some students out of Lamar High School.
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