Chesterfield County's school board was set to vote Tuesday night on a plan that could shift roughly 180 elementary school students among four Bermuda District schools, including moving students out of overcrowded Curtis Elementary and into neighboring schools with room to spare. The proposal targets Bellwood, Bensley, Curtis and Wells, and comes after Curtis ballooned past its intended capacity while sprouting trailer after trailer on its campus.
Under the plan, 60 Curtis students would move to Bellwood Elementary, 53 would move to Wells Elementary, and 67 Bellwood students would shift to Bensley Elementary, according to richmonder.org. The changes would take effect next school year and are meant to shift Curtis students to nearby elementary schools with additional room, easing the overcrowding that has defined recent years at the school, as reported by WTVR CBS 6.
The numbers behind the proposal tell the story plainly. Curtis Elementary was running at roughly 96% capacity last academic year by the county's own website figures, though the school district says it has since breached 100%, per the same richmonder.org report. Chesterfield County Chief of Operations Reid Wodicka told WTVR that Curtis is now very full and has eight trailers on campus, with two added this year alone due to continued growth — while the station reported the campus currently has ten trailers in total.
Trailers Without Bathrooms, Lost Class Time
For families at Curtis, the overcrowding isn't an abstraction. Kortne Kellam, PTA president at Curtis Elementary, told WTVR that her daughter attends class in one of those trailers and loses instructional time simply walking to places like the bathroom and the lunchroom — WTVR reported that Kellam's daughter misses about 12 minutes on average for that travel, since the trailers themselves lack bathrooms. Kellam also described the trailers as not very secure, according to the station's report.
Kellam isn't opposed to redistricting, but she worries it will only buy Curtis a little time before new families fill the gap again. She pointed to the wave of apartments and townhomes being built or planned near the school as a driver of the capacity crunch, and told the outlet that Curtis ultimately needs a new, bigger building or an expansion rather than another round of boundary shuffling.
Nearby Schools Have Room to Absorb the Shift
The schools slated to take on Curtis students currently have breathing room. Bellwood Elementary was reported at 79.4% capacity and Wells Elementary at 75.8%, while Bensley Elementary sat at 71.4%, according to richmonder.org's figures — all below the 80% to 90% range Wodicka has described as the county's target program capacity. WTVR separately reported the same three schools at 79%, 76% and 72% capacity, respectively, underscoring how far they sit below Curtis's crowding.
Chesterfield's growth pressures extend beyond this one corridor. About 3,600 new residential units are expected to be built across the county over the next five years, with roughly a third of those in western Chesterfield, per a VPM report from last year. VPM also reported Tuesday that the board planned to take up the Bermuda District changes specifically because of enrollment growth at Curtis.
A Familiar Playbook From Last Year
This wouldn't be the first time Chesterfield has redrawn elementary boundaries to relieve an overstuffed school. Last September, the board voted 4-0 to rezone part of Falling Creek Elementary's district to Bensley Elementary, with Chair Dot Heffron absent from the vote, per VPM's reporting at the time. Falling Creek was running at about 130% capacity, Wodicka said then, with more than 820 students enrolled and 21 trailers crowding its campus in the 2024-25 school year.
The fix in that case involved new construction: a replacement Bensley school was expected to open with roughly twice its old capacity, built to absorb about 120 students who would otherwise have landed at Falling Creek, according to VPM. Whether Curtis eventually gets a similar rebuild, as Kellam has urged, remains an open question the district has not addressed in its current proposal.
Tuesday's meeting was scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. in the public meeting room off Iron Bridge Road in Chesterfield County. The board's decision on the Bermuda District plan would determine whether the 180 proposed student moves take effect for the next school year.
