The school board votes Tuesday on the plan that decides whether your child can attend a school you are not zoned for, and the plan comes with a table of where there is room.

There is room in twelve elementary schools and two K-8 academies. The table lists fourteen schools and not one of them is a middle school or a high school. There is no section for middle schools on it and no section for high schools, and none is named anywhere in it.

Here is what that means for your kid. If you have an elementary student and you want a different school, there are seats, though at most schools it is a handful and only in one or two grades. If you have a middle schooler or a high schooler, controlled open enrollment is not the way out of your zoned school this year, because the district’s own count says the seats are not there.

The plan is item W.1 Tuesday, under Operational Services, and it is one of only five items on the agenda the board takes as action rather than on consent. The meeting is at 4:30 p.m. in the School Board Auditorium at 40 Orange Street, and it runs on WebEx as well.

The district’s summary says Florida Statute 1002.31 required controlled open enrollment and that School Board Rule 5.03 carries it out through this plan. It says the updated plan “includes a listing of the schools qualifying for Controlled Open Enrollment based on the first 12 weeks by grade for the 2026-2027 SY.” The table’s own column heading says something slightly different, “1st 20-Day Enrollment by Grade,” and a footnote under it says “1st Twenty Day Attendance by grade.” Both descriptions are printed in the same item.

Here is the table, by school and grade, in the column the district heads “Maximum Available Seats by Grade.” Webster Elementary has the most of anybody: 19 in kindergarten, four in first grade and eight in second.

Osceola Elementary has 17 across four grades, two in kindergarten, two in second, five in fourth and eight in fifth. Hartley Elementary has four in kindergarten and six each in fourth and fifth. Ketterlinus Elementary has two in kindergarten, four in first, four in fourth and three in fifth. Wards Creek Elementary has nine in fourth and six in fifth.

Cunningham Creek Elementary has eight in kindergarten and one in first. RB Hunt Elementary has eight, all of them in kindergarten. Ocean Palms Elementary has four in kindergarten and three in fifth. Mason Elementary has two in kindergarten and one in fifth. Hickory Creek Elementary has three in kindergarten. Timberlin Creek Elementary has two in kindergarten. South Woods Elementary has one, in first grade. That is the whole list.

The two K-8 academies carry a little. Freedom Crossing Academy has three seats in fourth grade. Sabal Crest Academy has seven across sixth through eighth, and the seats line on its total row reads “Not to exceed.”

Do not add those numbers up and treat the total as the number of children who can move. A footnote on the table says the maximum number of cumulative seats allotted by grade may not exceed the total number of seats available by school, and another says the maximum at any school may be limited by how many teachers it has. The footnotes are on the table itself.

Controlled open enrollment is also not the only door. The same plan carries hardship transfers, programs of choice and career academies, and the schedule attached to it opens new student registration for career academies and programs of choice from Jan. 5 to Jan. 25, 2027. The plan sends parents to www.stjohns.k12.fl.us/choice for the applications and to www.stjohns.k12.fl.us/zoning to find out which school an address is zoned for.

Further down the same agenda, on consent this time, is a document that says the same thing about high schools in a different language. Item V.2 is a school concurrency proportionate share mitigation agreement for Bartram Grove, inside the Bartram Park DRI. The district’s summary says a developer has asked St. Johns County to add 90 single family and 90 multi-family units there, and that the district has to review available capacity and appropriate mitigation for the students those homes would generate.

The agreement does that arithmetic on its own face. It says the development would generate 38.5 elementary school students, 20.5 middle school students and 26.5 high school students. It says adequate capacity is available at the adopted level of service standards for the elementary students and the middle school students. Then it says adequate capacity is not available for the 26.5 high school students, not in the concurrency service area the homes sit in, and not in any area next to it. It says that high school capacity “will not be in place or under actual construction within three (3) years after the approval of the Development Proposal.”

The clause after that says authorizing the homes without mitigation “would result in a failure of the Level of Service Standard for public school facilities in one or more applicable Concurrency Service Areas, or will exacerbate existing deficiencies in Level of Service.” So the developer pays instead. The agreement sets the proportionate share mitigation at $329,860.00, or $1,833.00 per dwelling unit, and prints both figures in bold.

Proportionate share mitigation is a check. Adequate school capacity is not available means the high school those children would be zoned for is full, and the district does not expect to have built the room inside three years.

The check cannot be spent on just anything. The agreement cites Subsection 163.3180(6)(h)2.c, Florida Statutes, which it says requires that any proportionate share mitigation be directed toward a school capacity improvement already identified in the five-year school board educational facilities plan, or be set aside and not spent until such an improvement has been identified.

The vote is Tuesday, Oct. 13. The enrollment plan the board is voting on covers the 2026-2027 school year, which is the one already under way, and its application windows run alongside what the plan calls the twelve-week capacity reviews.

The same meeting asks the board to approve the minutes of five meetings held in September, among them the Sept. 10 final public hearing that adopted this year’s school millage and budget.