Council Member Renée Johnson (District 4) brought a manually-compiled CMS school-utilization report to the dais Monday and used it to argue that the council's conventional rezoning process is not tracking the cumulative impact of new growth on Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
"I've been saying this for a long time," she told the council during the night's Goud Properties conventional rezoning (petition 2026-006), "but here is proof. We have a petition from 2024, and the CMS school utilization is higher than one in 2025. It just doesn't, the math is not mathing."
Her example was Mallard Creek High School, a north Charlotte CMS high school. In 2024, she said, council approved a petition that staff projected would push the school to 113 percent of capacity. A year later, a staff memo on a different petition affecting the same school listed Mallard Creek at 110 percent. "When are we calculating the petitions that we've approved?" Johnson asked. She said staff has told her the school formula is "really complicated" and that schools have to be 20 percent over capacity before the impact gets flagged.
"If you look at the information we're given, we are not given enough information to make educated decisions on the impact of this growth," she said. "These conventional petitions were being given even less. I had this report created because I've been saying this for five years now."
Conventional rezonings — the category Johnson had already led a four-member opposition against earlier in the same meeting — do not require petitioners to commit to specific uses or site plans.
Council Member Joi Mayo (District 3) added a separate data point: Raki McGregor of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Black Political Caucus had told a caucus meeting the prior day that CMS is losing students. Mayo said the question of how growth maps to enrollment, both up and down, is broader than the rezoning process alone captures.
Mayor Vi Lyles offered the procedural response. CMS has presented to council multiple times in past years on its enrollment and capacity model, she said. "It may be an opportunity to have CMS come back and join us to give us an update on that particular calculus."