Five schools would no longer be closed off to new resident families, though one school would be newly closed off, under a proposal presented to the Wake school board on Tuesday.

The proposal comes as leaders grapple with varying growth patterns around the county, stagnant overall enrollment and the presence of hundreds of trailers to accommodate for growth -- while also trying to refocus facility planning more on renovations, rather than new school buildings.

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The school systems wants to remove enrollment "caps" at five schools next year -- Alston Ridge, Holly Grove, Parkside and Scotts Ridge elementary schools and Heritage High. It wants to add a cap at Zebulon Magnet Elementary, where growth has exploded.

"There is no solution down the road that's coming fast enough," Susan Pulliam, district senior director of student assignment, told the Wake school board's facilities committee Tuesday, speaking of Zebulon.

The school board will vote on the caps next year, as early as January.

Caps are often put in place when a school becomes overcrowded and growth in the area is too significant for the school to serve.

A cap allows current students and families who have already settled in the area to attend the school, but it closes off enrollment to any new families who move into the area. Instead, those families are moved to an "overflow" school that has enough room to take the students, and they're bused to that school.

The caps are often confusing and frustrating to new families, who may move to an area not knowing the school is capped.

The bulk of the 22 current caps are in the fast-growing western corridor of the county.

The number of caps has gradually reduced as new schools have opened and as enrollment has largely stagnated, hovering around 160,000 students for the past decade.

While enrollment has largely stagnated, it has remained high in some of the faster-growing areas, keeping many of the caps in place.

The district still has hundreds of trailers at schools to accommodate for the massive growth some areas have experienced in recent decades, and those trailers have been slow to be removed, sitting at schools for 20 or more years in some cases.

The recent opening of four new schools and recent reassignment plans have moved students out of some of the more crowded schools, leading five of them to no longer be overcrowded, in areas not expected to grow significantly.

"In some of these instances, we might start being able to recommend trailer removal," Pulliam said. "We are cautiously optimistic that this will hold we'll be able to keep the cap off for a sustained period of time."

The four elementary schools are in western Wake, while Heritage High is in Wake Forest.

But recent growth in eastern Wake County is leading to a new cap and a handful of new trailers.

Zebulon Magnet Elementary is 18% over capacity -- by 102 students -- and it doesn't have any room for additional classroom trailers.

The school is already using its state "Restart" status to bypass the state's class size limits for kindergarten through third grades. Restart schools can have some operational flexibilities that other schools don't, including larger class sizes. A school can participate in the state's Restart program only so long as it meets the criteria to participate, which means it has been academically underperforming for a certain number of years.

Using Restart to manage growth isn't ideal, Pulliam said.

The class-size limits have contributed to crowding issues at schools by requiring the use of more classrooms.

Some classrooms have two teachers to allow them to enroll more students in one room, Pulliam said.

Two trailers each are also set to be added to Wakelon Elementary in Zebulon and Carver Elementary in Wendell. Wakelon would be the overflow school, under the capping proposal before the board, and Carver will absorb more students until Marshburn Elementary opens in what's currently estimated to be 2030.

Reducing the number of trailers is a goal of Superintendent Robert Taylor, who noted that many of them were temporary solutions that have become permanent ones.

The district has to accommodate its continued growth areas while also paying more attention to the facilities issue that has been neglected over the years, he said.

"How do we add more buildings, because we have grown tremendously in the last 20 and 30 years? But also, how do we maintain what we have? So for me, that is a serious concern," he said. "You know that there is a tremendous amount of... deferred maintenance that we haven't been able to address [and] comes at a huge cost."