Students at Carver Middle School will head to new campuses this fall after the Meridian Public School District Board of Trustees voted Thursday to consolidate the school into other campuses.

MPSD Superintendent Amy Carter said students and staff from Carver Middle will be divided among Northwest Middle School and Magnolia Middle School next year.

“Instead of trying to spread all of our resources across three campuses, we will now be able to concentrate our resources on two campuses,” she said. “Our Carver babies will be welcome at Northwest and Magnolia middle schools, and now instead of having Bears and Eagles and Bulldogs, we’ll now have middle school Wildcats.”

Carter said the decision to consolidate was reached as schools nationwide struggle to find qualified teachers.

The move to consolidate the schools, she said, will allow the district to ensure each child gets a quality education.

“It’s not a secret there’s a teacher shortage in our nation, and we just want to make sure all of our kids start the school year with a caring and qualified educator,” she said. “This allows us to do that.”

Magnolia Middle Principal Sherrod Miller said he’s excited to welcome students and staff from Carver in the fall. The consolidation, he said, will add highly skilled educators to Magnolia’s staff and allow the school to expand on the courses offered to students.

“We are super excited to have additional staff and students,” he said. “The staff coming over, they have some awesome staff members at Carver, and we’ve been not able to fully staff with fully qualified people, so having those people already in place with their expertise is going to be awesome.”

Miller said he looked forward to adding Spanish language courses as well as drug awareness and other health-related course for students to take next year.

With the consolidation, Carter said, no staff member will be without a job, and their expertise would continue to benefit middle school students on the Northwest and Magnolia campuses.

As part of the consolidation plan, Carter said the school district tried to redraw the lines for each school in the least disruptive way possible. She said MPSD will be reaching out to parents over the summer to help them know where their child will be going to school come fall.

“We are so excited to be talking to our parents very soon about which campuses their students will be assigned to attend,” she said.

As for what will happen to the school building itself, Carter, who began her career as a teacher at Carver, said she wants to reassure the community the school’s history would be preserved.

“I don’t want the community to worry about the Carver building being closed because we’re going to repurpose it into something else,” she said. “We’ll be able to share more about that in the coming months.”