An expected influx of high school students during the next few years in Carroll County public schools has prompted school officials to consider shrinking the attendance area of North Carroll High School and contemplate scrapping plans to reduce capacity at the mammoth Westminster High School.

Enrollment projections released this month show that county schools are expected to gain nearly 800 high-schoolers in the next four years while elementary and middle school populations level off or decline slightly.

The over-capacity student population at Hampstead's North Carroll High will continue to swell through at least the 2009-2010 school year.

The 26-year-old school, built for 1,360 students, now has 1,558. The school is projected to gain 100 students in the next three years.

"They are using every nook and cranny and then some," Susan Holt, vice president of the Carroll County school board, said. "Even some of those closets are doubled up."

Superintendent Charles I. Ecker said the school district might need to redraw the boundaries for the school's attendance area for the 2004-2005 school year, shifting students who would have attended North Carroll High southward into the Westminster attendance areas.

That reallocation would pinch two Westminster-area high schools and could derail school officials' attempts to decrease capacity at Westminster High, which is much larger than the 1,200-student high schools the county has built in recent years.

Even after the opening of nearby Winters Mill High School in August, Westminster High has 2,132 students. This year, it is 219 students over capacity. With projections showing the school's enrollment hovering in the 1,700s for the next five years, plans to decrease the school's capacity to 1,600 and convert vacated space into new career and technology classrooms might have to be scuttled, school officials say.

But one point could prevent the school system from scrapping those plans.

The state Board of Public Works reimbursed Carroll County $3.5 million last year for Winters Mill High on the condition that the school district shrink the student population of Westminster High to make room for more vocational programs.

Ecker must justify to state school planners his proposal to maintain Westminster High's current capacity and to retain the school's classroom space for its instructional needs.