What School Is My Little Rock Address Zoned For (And Why the Map Lies)
Almost every neighborhood guide in Little Rock names one school per neighborhood. That is the single most common piece of bad information in Central Arkansas real estate. Hillcrest is split. The Heights is split. Midtown is split four ways. Part of Chenal is not in the Little Rock School District at all, despite sitting inside the Little Rock city limits. This guide lays out where the lines actually fall, says plainly which lines are unresolved and why, and shows you how to verify your specific address before you write an offer.
The short answer: neighborhoods are not zones
A neighborhood is a name people use. An attendance zone is a polygon a school district draws. The two were never designed to match, and in Little Rock they frequently do not. When a listing site tells you a home is zoned for a particular elementary school, it is usually reporting the school nearest the center of the neighborhood, not the school assigned to that address.
This matters because school zoning is often the deciding factor between two otherwise similar homes, and because it is discovered late. Buyers learn the real zone at registration, after Closing, when the options are gone. A street name is not a school assignment. Neither is a neighborhood name.
Portals are structurally unable to fix this. Their data model assigns one school to one neighborhood polygon. When a district boundary cuts straight through that polygon, which is the normal case here rather than the exception, the model has no way to represent it. That is why the answer below comes from the county parcel GIS and the district's own boundary layer rather than from a listing feed.
How to check your own address before you write an offer
Do three things, in this order, and do them while the home is still a candidate rather than a contract.
First, pull the address on the Pulaski County GIS parcel viewer at pagis.org and confirm which school district the parcel sits in. Inside the Little Rock city limits is not the same thing as inside the Little Rock School District. Confirming the district first prevents the most expensive mistake on this page.
Second, call the district and read them the full street address, not the neighborhood. Little Rock School District Student Registration is 501-447-2950. Pulaski County Special School District Office of Equity and Pupil Services is 501-234-2021. Ask for elementary, middle and high separately, because the splits do not line up with one another.
Third, get the answer in writing, by email, with the date on it. Zones change. A verbal answer in April is not evidence in August. If your Realtor is doing their job, this is a call they make for you and a message they forward to you.
If you would rather not make the calls, send us the address. We will run the parcel, make the district call and send you what they say, with the date and the name of who said it. There is no cost and no obligation attached to it.
Hillcrest: one neighborhood, two elementary zones
Hillcrest splits at elementary between Forest Park and Pulaski Heights, with the dividing line running roughly along Hillcrest Avenue. Homes a few doors apart on opposite sides of that line are zoned to different elementary schools.
Because Hillcrest is compact and walkable, buyers reasonably assume a single neighborhood school. Two houses on the same block can carry different answers. If you are buying in Hillcrest specifically because of a school, the address check is not optional.
The Heights and Cammack Village: the line is North University
The Heights splits at North University Avenue. Addresses east of North University fall to Forest Park. Addresses west of it, including all of Cammack Village, fall to Jefferson.
There is a second line further in, around Evergreen and L Street, that moves addresses into Pulaski Heights. So The Heights is not a two-way split so much as a three-zone neighborhood, and Cammack Village, which people often treat as a separate place, sits cleanly on the Jefferson side.
This is the split most often reported wrong, because The Heights carries a strong single identity and the name suggests a single school.
Midtown: four elementary zones, and a middle school nobody can agree on
Midtown is the hardest one in the city. At elementary it splits four ways, across McDermott, Pulaski Heights, Forest Park and Stephens. There is no version of Midtown that has one elementary school.
At middle school, the honest answer is that it is unresolved. The Little Rock School District's posted attendance map and the Pulaski County GIS boundary layer disagree with each other about where the J.A. Fair and Pulaski Heights line falls. We are not going to pick a side and publish it as fact, because a buyer would rely on it.
If you are buying in Midtown and middle school matters to you, treat the published maps as a starting point and get the district's answer in writing for your exact address. This is the one place in Central Arkansas where we tell buyers plainly that the public record does not currently produce a reliable answer.
Downtown and SoMa: split at elementary and again at middle
Downtown splits at elementary between Carver Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. It then splits again at middle school, which is unusual. SoMa addresses return Dunbar. The rest of downtown returns Pulaski Heights.
A downtown buyer therefore has to check twice. An address can share an elementary zone with a neighbor and not share a middle school zone with that same neighbor.
Chenal: inside the city, outside the district
This is the one that surprises people most, including people who have lived in Little Rock for decades. Chenal straddles two school districts. Part of it is Little Rock School District. Part of it is Pulaski County Special School District. Chenal Elementary itself is a PCSSD school, not an LRSD school.
The district line crosses Chenal Parkway near the 14000 block and splits several named communities, including Lamarche, Maisons, Courts and Chenonceau. Two homes in the same gated community can sit in different school districts.
The reason is legal history rather than geography. Federal desegregation litigation tied the Little Rock School District's boundary to the Little Rock city limits as they stood in the mid 1980s. In November 1985 the Eighth Circuit ordered most district boundaries to coincide with the city limits. Chenal was annexed into the city after that point, so annexation into Little Rock did not carry it into the Little Rock School District. The city grew west. The school district boundary did not follow.
Treat any claim that Chenal is an LRSD neighborhood, or a PCSSD neighborhood, as wrong on its face. It is both, and which one applies to you is an address-level question.
Maumelle: the district that publishes no map
Maumelle is Pulaski County Special School District. That part is simple. What is not simple is verifying it at the address level, because PCSSD publishes no machine-readable attendance zone map. There is no layer to query and no interactive lookup to point you at.
So for Maumelle the only honest answer is a phone call to PCSSD Office of Equity and Pupil Services at 501-234-2021. Any site that shows you a confident Maumelle attendance zone map is showing you a modeled estimate, not the district's boundary. We would rather tell you to make a two minute phone call than hand you a guess.
What changed in August 2026: the new high school map
On August 27, 2026, the Little Rock School District board voted five to two to adopt a new high school attendance zone plan, known as Option 3.5, ahead of the opening of Little Rock West High School in fall 2027. West High will sit on Arkansas 10 next to Pinnacle View Middle School.
Under the approved plan, the high school boundary runs along Reservoir Road and Rodney Parham north of Interstate 630, and along University Avenue south of Interstate 630. West High will absorb the John Barrow neighborhood from the former Southwest zone, and the River Ridge and Robinwood neighborhoods from the former Central zone. The plan includes a choice provision for families with children already enrolled.
If you are buying in west Little Rock with a high school student or a soon to be high school student, this is the single most important recent change on this page. A high school answer given before late August 2026 may no longer be the answer for fall 2027.
Ask the district specifically whether the address you are buying is affected by Option 3.5, and whether the choice provision applies to your family. Those are two separate questions and the second one depends on your enrollment history, not on your address.
Three things that will trip you up
The posted maps are older than they look. The Little Rock School District's published attendance zone maps carry a January 2020 stamp. They remain the district's official posted maps, and they are the right place to start, but a five year old map is not the same as a current confirmation for your address.
The GIS layer contradicts itself in places. The county boundary layer carries school links that are stale and occasionally point at a different school than its own name fields report. When the two disagree, the district's registration office is the tiebreaker, not the map.
Elementary, middle and high do not move together. This is the error that costs people the most. Buyers confirm the elementary zone, feel satisfied, and never check middle or high. In Downtown, Midtown and west Little Rock, those are three separate answers and they split along three different lines.
Why we publish the uncertainty instead of hiding it
It would be easy to write this page with a clean table, one school per neighborhood, no caveats. It would rank. It would also be wrong often enough to hurt somebody, and a buyer who relies on a confident wrong answer does not get a second chance after Closing.
So where the record is clear, this page says so. Where the record is genuinely contested, as with the Midtown middle school line, this page says that too, and points you at the person who can settle it. That is the standard we hold across every neighborhood we cover.
If you want the answer for a specific address rather than a neighborhood, that is a phone call we are glad to make for you.
Where this comes from
School district and attendance zone boundaries were checked against the Pulaski Area Geographic Information System parcel and attendance zone layers at pagis.org, and against the Little Rock School District's posted attendance zone maps at lrsd.org.
Chenal Elementary's district assignment was confirmed against the National Center for Education Statistics public school directory, which lists it under Pulaski County Special School District.
The 1985 Eighth Circuit ruling tying district boundaries to city limits is documented in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry on the Little Rock School Desegregation Cases.
The August 27, 2026 high school rezoning, the Option 3.5 boundary description, the five to two vote and the fall 2027 West High opening were reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, KATV, KARK and the Arkansas Times.
Verification numbers: Little Rock School District Student Registration, 501-447-2950. Pulaski County Special School District Office of Equity and Pupil Services, 501-234-2021.
Frequently asked
Is Chenal in the Little Rock School District?
Partly. Chenal straddles two districts. Some Chenal addresses are Little Rock School District and some are Pulaski County Special School District, and the line crosses Chenal Parkway near the 14000 block, splitting communities including Lamarche, Maisons, Courts and Chenonceau. Chenal Elementary itself is a PCSSD school. Being inside the Little Rock city limits does not put an address inside the Little Rock School District, because federal desegregation litigation tied the district boundary to the city limits as they stood in the mid 1980s and Chenal was annexed after that.
Can two houses on the same street be zoned for different schools?
Yes, and in Little Rock it is common. Hillcrest splits at elementary roughly along Hillcrest Avenue. The Heights splits at North University Avenue. Downtown splits at both elementary and middle. Midtown splits four ways at elementary. Neighbors can and do have different school assignments.
What school is my address zoned for in Midtown?
At elementary, Midtown splits four ways across McDermott, Pulaski Heights, Forest Park and Stephens, so the answer depends entirely on your address. At middle school the answer is currently unresolved, because the Little Rock School District's posted map and the county GIS boundary layer disagree about where the J.A. Fair and Pulaski Heights line falls. We will not publish a guess. Call LRSD Student Registration at 501-447-2950 with your full address and ask for the answer in writing.
Did Little Rock high school zones just change?
Yes. On August 27, 2026 the LRSD board voted five to two to adopt a new high school attendance zone plan, Option 3.5, ahead of Little Rock West High School opening in fall 2027. The new boundary runs along Reservoir Road and Rodney Parham north of Interstate 630 and along University Avenue south of Interstate 630. West High absorbs John Barrow from the former Southwest zone and River Ridge and Robinwood from the former Central zone. A choice provision applies to families with children already enrolled.
Why do listing sites show a different school than the district does?
Listing portals assign one school to one neighborhood polygon. When a district boundary cuts through the middle of that polygon, which happens throughout Little Rock, the portal has no way to represent the split and reports whichever school is nearest the center. It is a limitation of the data model, not a mistake by any one site. The district's registration office is the only authority on your specific address.
How do I verify the school zone for a Maumelle address?
Call Pulaski County Special School District's Office of Equity and Pupil Services at 501-234-2021. Maumelle is PCSSD, but PCSSD publishes no machine-readable attendance zone map, so there is no layer or lookup tool that can confirm an individual address. Any interactive Maumelle zone map you find online is a modeled estimate rather than the district's own boundary.
When should I check school zoning during a home purchase?
Before you write the offer, not after. Zoning is not a contingency you can typically unwind a contract with, so discovering the real answer during registration in July leaves you with no options. Confirm the district on the parcel, call the district with the full street address, ask for elementary, middle and high separately, and keep the written answer with the date on it.