As DPS Enrollment Drops, One Elementary School Grapples with Overcrowding

When fifth-grade teacher Megan Lewis was hired to teach at Lyons Farm Elementary, she jumped at the opportunity to create the culture of a brand-new school. The school opened in fall 2022, and for two years, she had plenty of space to get creative, using empty classrooms to do yoga with her students and hold reading groups.

In year three, enrollment picked up. The school hired a fourth teacher on Lewis’ team. Classes filled every room, and Lewis was excited to see Lyons Farm grow. 

When enrollment kept climbing last school year, teachers began crunching into new spaces. Spanish and STEM teachers were displaced from their rooms and instead began visiting classes with carts. The occupational therapist set up her office in the kitchen and students were pulled into hallways or stairwells for small-group instruction.

“Not only was every room full, but then all of a sudden, we literally don’t have enough rooms,” Lewis said. “So then it became very stressful.”

Lyons Farm was built in South Durham, one of the fastest-growing parts of the county, to support the area’s new developments and help relieve overcrowding at neighboring schools. But only a few years after Lyons Farm opened, the school has 647 students as of October 8—roughly 60 students over its “functional” capacity of 584.

At a meeting this summer, the school board approved building six modular classrooms, portable trailer units that will accommodate 156 students, for the 2027–28 school year. 

But South Durham will see uninterrupted growth over the next five to 10 years, even as other parts of Durham see slower population growth, Durham Public Schools (DPS) Superintendent Anthony Lewis said at the July meeting.

“That building should have been built a lot larger than it was originally built, but that’s hindsight,” the superintendent said. “And so we are now patching up what should have been done in the past.” 

The district is considering adjusting the school’s boundaries, but no proposal has been finalized. Director of School Planning Devan Mitchell told the INDY that the school’s size aligns with enrollment projections at the time it was designed.

Over-enrollment at Lyons Farm illustrates a larger challenge for DPS: As South Durham adds students faster than the district can keep up, other areas are losing students and desks sit empty. 

This school year, DPS has about 400 fewer students than the year prior. In 2025, DPS saw its largest enrollment drop since the pandemic, with 1,000 fewer students than the year before. 

The school board voted in June to develop redistricting scenarios that address over- and under-enrollment across DPS, including at Lyons Farm. The board has also discussed consolidating some aging elementary schools into newer ones to minimize operational costs. 

The district’s plan to adjust school boundaries and consolidate buildings likely won’t move forward until 2028, Mitchell told the INDY. And while Lyons Farm awaits the modular units, administration, teachers, and staff are left to address its climbing student population. 

“It’s a challenging problem to have,” Principal James Hopkins said, “because when the numbers started to balloon, we’re sitting in this building, trying to figure out, where are we going to put them in a building that has a capacity?” 

School Spirit

When Lyons Farm parent Julia Buckner moved to South Durham in 1998, her neighborhood was surrounded by cow pastures and forests. Now, the trees behind her property have been cut down for townhomes, and apartments are popping up down the street.

As the area saw new developments—such as The Streets at Southpoint mall in 2002—it needed a new school to keep pace, and Creekside Elementary School opened in 2005. 

South Durham rapidly grew as the neighboring Research Triangle Park saw continued investment and development. In the census tract around Lyons Farm, the number of school-age children grew by 53% between 2010 and 2024, compared to 17% growth in the rest of Durham, according to the Carolina Population Center. 

By the fall of 2018, Creekside was nearly 200 students over capacity. Despite a boundary adjustment the next year to send some students to Parkwood Elementary School, both schools were well over their capacities by the time Lyons Farm broke ground in 2021.

Lyons Farm opened up to students in fall 2022, costing nearly $40 million. It was named after the Lyon family, descendants of enslaved people who owned and leased the former farmland. The school’s opening immediately alleviated the overcrowding at Creekside and Parkwood. Lyons Farm was sitting below capacity in its inaugural year and was expected to grow, but district leaders didn’t expect this much. 

Besides population growth, Lyons Farm’s academic performance and morale have also brought in new families. Buckner was one of several parents who transferred her kids in from private school. Others came from charter schools and homeschooling, according to Hopkins, the principal.

Lyons Farm’s 2025 report card set it above other schools in DPS and North Carolina; both staff and parents told the INDY how Hopkins has not only creatively handled the overcrowding but also fostered a positive school spirit.

“Everybody’s trying hard to make it work, and it does,” Buckner said. 

For Hopkins, leading a brand-new school was a dream come true. As construction got underway, he conducted more than a dozen focus groups to understand what parents wanted and crafted his ideal team of teachers from across the district.

Several years in, he said the enrollment growth is a testament to the teachers in the building.

“When good teachers are demonstrating strong teacher effectiveness data, I think there is a level of confidence that the community begins to develop in the local neighborhood public school,” he said.

Hopkins says hello to each student by name (he studied the yearbook ahead of the school year). He waves at the students heading to class, and they excitedly wave back. 

On a recent October morning, a first grade classroom is brimming with chatter, as the 30-plus students cut paper into the shape of fall leaves and track the colors in a chart. In the hall, kids skip past cheerful displays of the school’s motto, which could take on a double meaning amid Lyons Farms’ enrollment boom: the art of growth. 

Fifth-grade teacher Jessica On said while the overcrowding puts a strain on teachers, she loves the school and feels supported by Hopkins and her team. 

“It’s a testament to how well our school is doing, and families want to come here, and we just got to figure out a better system to accommodate all these families,” On said.

‘Microwaving My Food as They’re Doing Phonics’ 

Early on a Friday morning, a kindergarten teacher encourages her 5- and 6-year-olds to stay quiet as they head into Lyons Farm’s media center, so as to not disrupt the two classes going on inside. Thin fabric dividers split up the room to create two classrooms, with just enough space left for the library’s bookshelves. 

Down the hall, administrators have offices in supply closets, three teachers share a windowless conference room as their classroom, and the teacher’s lounge has become a space for reading groups.

“I’m literally microwaving my food as they’re doing phonics, like at the table that I usually would have sat at,” On said. “People are kicked out of their offices during testing because we have no empty classrooms to hold small groups for testing—just a lot of trickle-down effects that because we don’t have space, every single room in the building is being used.”

School board member Millicent Rogers said meeting the state’s class-size limits—under 20 students for grades K-3—is challenging without the state funding for it. State law requires younger grades to be on the ground level of a school building for safety reasons, further limiting the space school administrators have to work with. 

In August, Alyssa Elliot’s first grader started at Lyons Farm in a class of 22 students. Two weeks in, Hopkins hired a new teacher and found a spot for the school’s eighth first-grade classroom—no cubbies or windows to the outside, but enough for the 10-student class with room to grow. 

“She’s handling it well, but it’s hard,” said Elliott, who is in the Parent Teacher Association. “These are 6-year-olds that spent two weeks in one class and then got moved to a whole other class with different people, different friends. They didn’t know who they were going to be in a class with. We didn’t get to meet our teacher.” 

The closet that used to store adaptive equipment for the Exceptional Children’s class is now a space for small group instruction. Teacher Maggie Dill stored wheelchairs and walkers in the hall, which she acknowledged posed a safety concern, until the fire marshal found that to be a hazard. Dill’s students get pulled out of class for physical, occupational, and speech therapies that take place in a busy hallway, which she says limits the quality of the services. 

As the EC department chair, Dill said two of her teachers left the school last year because they didn’t have space to teach.

“All of these services that children across the school are legally required to have based on their [Individualized Education Programs] can’t be done with fidelity, and they can’t be done in a way that’s the most positive learning environment for the child,” Dill said.

And for students with sensory sensitivities, it can be hard to manage a crowded cafeteria in a school that is “bursting at the seams,” Dill said. 

After enrollment outgrew cafeteria space in 2024, classes began rotating in for lunch starting at 10:20 a.m. to ensure time for each grade to eat. Lewis began wondering if the district would bring in modular units, and despite seeing district administrators visiting the school, she was waiting for any sort of relief.

“For two years it felt like we were yelling into the abyss, and nobody was understanding what’s going on,” Lewis said.

In the 2025-26 school year, teachers worried that with continued enrollment growth, music and art teachers would also be relegated to carts. They advocated to administration and the school board that those teachers needed their own classroom space for equipment. 

In order to keep these teachers in their rooms, Lyons Farm had to combine four first-grade classes into two, each with two co-teachers and about 30 students. 

“We’re playing defense, and I hate playing defense—but that’s what public educators do,” Hopkins said. 

The overcrowding has pushed some teachers out. Samantha Del Verne, who had been named the school’s teacher of the year, left DPS after the district denied her request to enroll her rising kindergartner at Lyons Farm. The district cited a policy that allows transfers for teachers’ kids only if there’s space. Her daughter was zoned for a year-round school in North Durham, which created logistical challenges for Del Verne.

The board granted an exception in July for three Lyons Farm teachers who had requested transfers for their children, barely six weeks before school started. By then, Del Verne had already taken a job in Orange County Schools and brought her kids with her.

“I don’t want to work for a district that doesn’t value me and doesn’t value my children,” Del Verne said.

Waiting for Relief 

As the shiny-new Lyons Farm sees families pour in, enrollment at Parkwood, just a six-minute drive away, has severely declined: It counted 418 students last year in a school that can fit 593.

While Lyons Farm has earned a “B” grade on its report card in recent years, Parkwood has earned a “D” each year since 2018. When a school is given a low-performing designation, parents can transfer their kids, which school board member Rogers said has likely contributed to Parkwood’s enrollment decline. She said the school has had four principals since 2022 and high rates of teacher turnover. 

The demographics at the two neighboring schools show a stark difference, with Lyons Farm being majority-white and more affluent than Parkwood’s majority-Black student body. Nearly 65% of Parkwood’s students are economically disadvantaged, according to the school’s 2025 report card, compared to 26% at Lyons Farm. 

Rogers chalked this up to white flight: White families with more resources can leave the low-performing school, while families of color are more dependent on local transportation.

Growing Together, DPS’s 2024 redistricting effort, was designed to balance out enrollment, diversify schools, and increase equitable access to magnet programs. While Growing Together didn’t significantly change Lyons Farm’s boundaries, as part of the initiative, the district launched a Spanish dual-language immersion (DLI) program at the school. Selection is based on a random lottery, and currently 37% of DLI students live outside of the Lyons Farm boundary lines. 

Rogers said to help alleviate crowding, she’d like the district to move the DLI program to Parkwood and consider capping enrollment. 

The district is considering a boundary adjustment for Lyons Farm that could be done separately from a larger redistricting effort, but for now, modular units are the only solution to overcrowding that the district is pursuing, Mitchell said. 

And the additional space won’t come until fall 2027 at the earliest, as modular units will take at least 12 months to build and install, according to Mitchell. The district has 109 modular units sitting at other schools, but those not being used are too old to be moved to Lyons Farm, necessitating six brand-new ones. Mitchell said she does not yet know how much they will cost.

Parent and PTA board member Corin Kane said it’s frustrating that the school has been overenrolled since 2024, yet the district waited til this summer to approve any sort of relief.

“Now we are in year five, and the conversation is modular units when we needed them two years ago,” Kane said. “It’s just negligent.” 

Over the past year, DPS Chief Operating Officer Kenneth Barnes and his team conducted walk-throughs of the school to evaluate the overcrowding and explore solutions.

“The growth in Southwest Durham is so fast, it’s hard to keep up with that,” Barnes said. 

Before Lyons Farm opened, Parkwood and Creekside were using modular classrooms, and the district intended to get students at all three schools into a brick-and-mortar room, according to a board meeting from November 2021. That is now a lofty goal. 

Lyon’s Farm was designed so that an additional 300-student wing could be added later. Mitchell said there’s no plan to build an additional wing and that the school likely won’t need it. The district’s current projections show enrollment growing from 647 students today to 683 next school year—about 100 over capacity—before declining to 597 by 2035. 

Some teachers doubt that the modular units will be enough; they’ll increase the school’s capacity to about 740. Dill, the EC department chair, said she thinks it will allow for some breathing room, but that it feels like a temporary solution to a much bigger problem. Fifth grade teacher Lewis said the school needs more space than what the modular units can provide. 

“It’ll be nice, but it’s not gonna take us back to where we were three years ago,” Lewis said.

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