Muscogee County School District Calendar 2026–2027

Muscogee County School District counted 28,172 K–12 students in Columbus. Its baseline secondary map is built around seven zoned comprehensive high schools—Carver, Hardaway, Jordan, Kendrick, Northside, Shaw and Spencer—while Columbus High sits within the district’s magnet system and uses a separate admissions route.

The magnet layer spans several forms. Britt David and Downtown are full elementary magnet schools; Rainey-McCullers is a grades 6–12 arts school; other themes sit inside otherwise conventional campuses. All prospective magnet students apply and complete the relevant entrance criteria, and some programs impose auditions, records reviews or continuation standards. A magnet name cannot be read as another neighborhood assignment.

Fort Benning introduces a separate governing authority. The installation returned to the Fort Benning name in 2025. Eligible on-post children can attend five DoDEA schools—four elementary and one middle—through grade eight; the base has no DoDEA high school. On-post ninth- through twelfth-graders enter local county schools, with Muscogee and Chattahoochee both serving parts of the installation.

Three questions can consequently lead to three different answers: the zoned Muscogee school for a Columbus address, the result of a magnet application, and the DoDEA-to-local transition for an on-post family. Columbus High, Rainey-McCullers and the federal base schools are all public options in the area, but they enter the student’s path under different rules.