The Perry-Lecompton school district plans to reassign Grantville elementary school to use exclusively by preschoolers and shift sixth-graders to Perry Middle School.

Concentration of the district’s residents to the south and east  closer to Lawrence and away from Grantville  also convinced the school board to place all fifth-graders at Williamstown School.

“It makes a lot of sense,” Supt. Steve Johnston said Monday. “It had nothing to do with philosophy. It had to do with overcrowding.”

Last year, Grantville and Williamstown shared the district’s fifth- and sixth-graders.

Here’s how the district will look next year: Perry and Lecompton schools are to stay kindergarten through fourth grade. Williamstown will be fifth grade only. Perry Middle School will be sixth, seventh and eighth grade. Perry-Lecompton High School will remain ninth through 12th grades.

Johnston said he was pleased children would still occupy Grantville’s building.

“We’ll have a program in there that is going to stay,” he said.

Head Start, a federal child-development program that has served low-income children since 1965, is expected to move in at Grantville. The district will help recruit children students for the class.

“We have to assist them with coming up with about 15 little leg-huggers,” Johnston said.

Johnston said facilities changes in the 1,000-student district also came amid a flurry other adjustments.

On Monday, the district hired a new principal for Perry Middle School. Judy Chamberlain, a fifth-grade teacher in Topeka’s Auburn-Washburn district, took the position.

In other changes:

 Eric Hyler, principal of Grantville and Williamstown schools, becomes associate principal of Perry-Lecompton High School.

 Paula Kellogg, the district’s assistant superintendent, will run Williamstown.