BAY MINETTE, Ala. — School district lines in Baldwin County may soon be re-drawn.

In an address to the Baldwin County Board of Education during its regular meeting Thursday, Board Attorney Scotty Lewis advised the board that procedures need to soon begin on redefining school-district lines in the county.

“Our population has grown by 50,000 since the 2000 census,” he said, explaining that “redistricting” will reflect the county’s growth. “The core of growth is in the Foley area and in the Eastern Shore area.”

According to Baldwin County Schools spokesman Terry Wilhite, redistricting comes every 10 years, once census data is reported.

“Under state criteria, boundaries have to be re-drawn,” he said in a telephone interview after the meeting.

Lewis explained that the 2010 census results indicate a population of 182,000 in Baldwin County, which houses seven school districts, also known as feeder patterns.

“The ideal district size would be just over 26,000,” he told the board.

According to to the board attorney, Districts 1, 3, 4 and 5 exceed that ideal, while Districts 2, 6 and 7 “are just under it.”

Lewis pointed to the sensitivity of deciding how to redistrict.

“There are a lot of considerations that go into the process of redrawing district lines,” he said, “one of which is that you need to be sensitive to how redistricting would affect minority voting.”

Lewis explained that the board had two options when considering how to re-draw district lines. One would be to “take existing districts and tweak the lines to make those existing districts work,” which would “move 15,800 people from one district to another.”

The board attorney pointed out that the second alternative is to “focus on feeder patterns.”

“That would be even more problematic from a numbers perspective,” Lewis said.

That’s because the starting point of each district’s feeder pattern varies.

“The feeder in Spanish Fort is under by 10,500,” Lewis told the board, “and Foley is over by 17,200.”

Lewis advised the board to begin discussing the process by September.

“You need to have a work session and public hearings,” he said. “Last time, public hearings were held within each district’s high school.”

Lewis explained that once proceedings begin, the timeline for state approval of the re-drawn district lines is six months.