This week Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials will unveil the latest plan for high school boundaries in the southern part of the county. It will be the 14th draft in a process that has taken more than a year.
Officials must weigh competing values, such as diversity and schools close to home. This time the decision-makers are new and the stakes are high.
Olde Providence Elementary School, a neighborhood school in south Charlotte, is a focal point of the latest debate. It’s a neighborhood school that serves almost 700 children, most of them white and living in middle-class or affluent homes. Their future is a crucial piece of a puzzle that affects thousands of current and future students — and has adults throughout the area on edge.
“I’m really sad that my neighborhood, District 5, is so divided,” says board member Lisa Cline, who lives in the Olde Providence neighborhood.
Cline, a retired teacher, was elected in November to represent a district that includes South Charlotte and Matthews. By Election Day, CMS had already spent months drafting a dozen scenarios for a new high school that will open in August 2024 … and then put it all on the back burner.
The new school, being built on Community House Road, is designed to relieve crowding at three of North Carolina’s biggest schools: Ardrey Kell, Myers Park and South Mecklenburg high schools.
A new “reset” draft came out last month, with a new board majority and a new interim superintendent in charge. It delighted some parents and dismayed others.
“I do thank the committee for listening to our concerns and recognizing what we saw as a seamless track for our kids,” India Bauer, an Olde Providence parent who supports the current CMS draft, said at a recent school board meeting.
But Lauren Reddick, who has two children at South Meck, got emotional as she told the board about all the changes that school has faced with previous assignment decisions.
“We as Saber Nation have embraced these changes and we embrace our beautiful diversity,” she said. “We now find ourselves at a tipping point.”
She’s referring to the prospect of increasing poverty levels at a school that’s currently racially and economically diverse.
Concentrations of poverty and all the disadvantages that accompany it often make it tough to recruit and keep experienced teachers. Test scores tend to be lower at high-poverty schools, which can lead to North Carolina assigning them low performance ratings. That, in turn, deters families who can move to other attendance zones or opt into private or charter schools.
The parents in Reddick’s camp see the Olde Providence Elementary zone as the key to creating socioeconomic diversity at South Meck.Diversity steeped in history
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools grabbed the national spotlight when it began busing for racial desegregation in 1970, under federal court orders. Some of today’s parents told the board they were students when that system continued in the 1990s — though they disagreed on what they took from that experience.
Annie Earnhardt, an Olde Providence parent who graduated from South Meck in 1995, told the board she moved at 15 “from a suburban Atlanta school to an incredibly diverse school. It was a tremendous opportunity for me and very formative.”
Samantha Farnham, an Olde Providence parent who graduated from Myers Park High in 1992, says her memory of busing is “what a negative experience it was to ride more than an hour to and from school to attend schools eight miles away.”
Much has changed in the ensuing decades. During court-ordered busing, students were classified for assignment purposes as Black or non-Black — which basically meant white.
Today, diversity at Ardrey Kell, a low-poverty school in the county’s southern tip, means 27% of students are of Asian descent. South Meck, about six miles north on Park Road, is 43% Latino.
Mayra Martinez Peña graduated from South Meck in 2019.
“I loved that it was almost evenly split with white, African American and Hispanics,” she recalls. “I felt very included and I felt seen as a Latina woman at South Mecklenburg High School.”
She’s a student at UNC Chapel Hill now, and she’s among more than 1,500 people who have signed an online petition asking CMS to protect South Meck’s diversity. Peña, who has been accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education to study education policy, says reducing white enrollment and driving up poverty levels will hurt South Meck’s cultural and academic richness.
“I think it’s just fair to have, like, a diversity of not only ethnicities but also diversity in socioeconomic status,” she said in an interview last week.Competing priorities
A lawsuit in the late 1990s led to the end of race-based assignment in CMS. Board policy now calls for making student assignment decisions based on diversity, proximity and the best use of available classrooms.
Surveys show most CMS families value diversity and want their kids to attend a strong school close to home. And common sense dictates avoiding empty classrooms at some schools while others nearby are ringed with trailers.
But it’s virtually impossible to meet all of those goals for all schools. For instance, CMS now gauges diversity by a complex measure that rates each Mecklenburg County census block as low, medium or high socioeconomic status, based on such measures as household income, adult education levels and home ownership. The district tried to balance SES levels, but that’s not easy in an economically divided county.
“Obviously we have a lot of concentrated wealth in the south part of the county,” CMS planning director Claire Schuch said when CMS rolled out the boundary reset in March. She said that poses a challenge in “making sure that we have schools that are as balanced as they can be in terms of socioeconomic status, given that there’s a lot of research about having students learn together from across different income levels promotes a better learning environment for all students.”
The March draft calls for students in the Olde Providence Elementary zone to attend South Charlotte Middle School, then Providence High — one of the district’s whitest and most affluent high schools.
Olde Providence Elementary is about three miles from Providence High and about five miles from South Meck, which is where some parents think the Olde Providence students should go.
Sarah Gass, one of the parents who supports the Providence High plan, told the school board that’s not a trivial difference for working parents driving in south Charlotte traffic.
“Last Thursday at 4 p.m. I drove from South Meck to OP Elementary and it took me 35 minutes,” she said. “At 4 p.m. last night I drove from Providence to OP and it took me 8 minutes.”
CMS also tries to keep feeder patterns intact. Ideally, students who attend a neighborhood elementary school could all move up to the same middle and high school. Gass, who has a child at Olde Providence, notes that the current arrangement is far from ideal.
“It is very sad at the end of fifth grade that most go to Carmel and then there’s this pocket of 30 to 40 kids who end up at a different middle school,” she said in an interview. “Then again at the end of eighth grade, our kids will split again and half go to Myers Park and half go to South Meck.”Capacity and diversity
The latest CMS plan also includes boundaries for a new south middle school that the district hopes to open in 2025. It would lead to South Charlotte Middle School being about 30% over capacity, at least until a proposed expansion some years down the road. Meanwhile, Carmel Middle School would be only about three-quarters full, leading to fears that it would lose teachers and other resources.
The plan also assigns most of the students from low-income neighborhoods to Quail Hollow and Carmel middle schools and to South Meck. Meanwhile, it reduces or maintains already-low poverty levels at Community House and South Charlotte middle schools and Providence and Ardrey Kell high.
CMS estimates that half the students at South Meck would come from neighborhoods classified as low socioeconomic status.
“In terms of head counts that’s over 1,300 students, which is about 300 students more than the low SES students at Ardrey Kell, Myers Park, the new relief high school and Providence combined,” Megan Hogan, president of the Beverly Woods Elementary PTA, told the board.
Hogan is among a group lobbying for an alternative plan.
“Our ask is that you keep Olde Providence Elementary at Carmel Middle, as they are today, and move Carmel as one intact feeder to South Meck,” she said. “Additionally, we ask that you rezone Sterling Elementary from South Meck to the new relief high school. This would accomplish balance in SES at three high schools.”High tension, high stakes
Every boundary decision leaves some people happy and others disappointed. But this one comes as CMS is preparing for a record-setting school bond campaign — and as it tries to recover enrollment after pandemic disruption.
Trent Merchant is a former school board member who ran for the District 5 seat last year. He lives in the area that’s affected by the south boundaries, one that’s commonly known as “the wedge,” running from some of Charlotte’s most affluent historic neighborhoods southeast of uptown south to Highway 51.
Merchant describes his neighbors as politically moderate, financially comfortable and — if they haven’t opted for private schools — fiercely committed to CMS. He calls the latest CMS plan “malpractice” and says it risks alienating those people.
“I am legitimately worried that if they screw this up, given the political climate, given the economy, given that we’re going into a recession, there’s a potential for a domino effect that comes by moderates inside 51 abandoning CMS,” Merchant said. He said that could spark the opening of new charter schools in the area, or “it could involve this area saying ‘To hell with your bond.’ ”
Merchant supports the community proposal to assign Olde Providence to Carmel and South Meck.
Cline says she’s still studying the options. She agrees with Merchant on the importance of this decision.
“I’d like to see CMS make sure we get it right this time. Because what happens in south county will have a ripple effect throughout the whole district,” she said.
Cline says she’d like the district to bring yet another high school into the mix: Waddell, in southwest Charlotte. It closed during the Great Recession, spent several years as a K-8 language magnet and will reopen in August to house magnet and specialty programs.
“I would like to see Waddell revisited, that the children who are now bused to South Meck, Harding, West Meck and Myers Park go to their home school,” Cline said in an interview before spring break.Next steps
Public meetings on this spring’s “reset” draft drew large, often raucous crowds. At 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 19, CMS will hold a meeting at Ardrey Kell High to present a 14th — and possibly final — boundary proposal.
After that the plan is:
- Virtual presentation of the new draft at noon Thursday.
- In-person presentation at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Providence High.
- Virtual presentation at noon Friday.
- Public hearing at the May 9 school board meeting, where the board will also review a final proposal.
- School board vote on May 23.
Find details about the meetings and updated proposals here.
