His son, a sixth-grader, lost friends in the move and had trouble making new friends during the first year or so at his new school, Parrish said.

“He begged to go back to his old school ... and now you’re going to force him again out of his comfort zone and try to make new friends all over again,” Parrish said about the proposed boundary changes. “It has almost a traumatizing effect on children.”

Parrish said he and over 30 of his neighbors held a meeting about the proposed boundaries earlier this month, and they asked him to speak on their behalf at the district’s last board of education meeting, on Dec. 12.

At the meeting, Parrish told board members how the redistricting has negatively affected families in the neighborhood and said they don’t feel like they were represented on the Long Range Planning Committee.

“Next time this comes up, guaranteed I’m going to be on (the committee), because we in this neighborhood are tired. We don’t have a lot of children in our neighborhood — roughly under 200 students ... and we’re just tired of it,” Parrish told board members. “Most of the neighborhood wanted to come up here with pitchforks and torches, and I’ve got most of them settled down, but guaranteed you’ve got a whole neighborhood mad over this.”