This article originally appeared in WFAE reporter Ann Doss Helms' weekly education newsletter. To get the latest school news in your inbox first, sign up for our email newsletters here.
After 15 months of off-and-on work, 15 attempts at drawing maps and a final five-hour meeting, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board made a decision last week about where to assign students across southern Mecklenburg County when new schools open in 2024 and 2025. (Click here for details).
The process began last spring, then went on hold until after November’s school board election. This spring saw a restart, with five new faces on the school board and a new leader in the superintendent’s seat. Board members reviewed thousands of comments and suggestions, and still had to face constituents who are bitterly disappointed. In particular, residents of the Polo Ridge Elementary zone said they were blindsided by a change of high school assignment that appeared only in the final proposal.
Summer Nunn and Lisa Cline, two recently-elected board members who represent the area most affected by the change, voted no — which seems like a smart political survival strategy, given the anger of some constituents. But both say they’ll support the majority decision, and urged families to give the plan a chance. (Watch their postmortem interview with The Observer’s Anna Maria Della Costa to hear more).
Given all that, you might think the board would be ready to take a long break from anything related to student assignment. But nope. They have already announced plans to tackle a broader review of student assignment, looking at what they learned from this round and how the district should move forward on creating the best opportunities for all students.
For instance, one of the board’s current priorities is avoiding concentrations of disadvantage. Some south county residents said CMS put too much emphasis on socioeconomic diversity, to the detriment of neighborhood schools and stability for kids. As last week’s meeting drew to a close, board member Jennifer De La Jara noted that decisions for the south county schools, which mostly serve fairly affluent neighborhoods, might have looked different if they’d been part of a countywide look at assignment.
“I do think had we been able to look at West Charlotte and some of the other schools and really taken a more comprehensive look, we would be in a different situation,” De La Jara said. She told me later she would have liked to look at moving some students from the northern part of the Myers Park High attendance zone to West Charlotte, which has a new building that isn’t full and, like Myers Park, offers an International Baccalaureate program.
West Charlotte is also a majority Black school with a high poverty level and a history of academic struggles. If you want to see community drama, try to move students from Myers Park to West Charlotte. (It’s worth noting that De La Jara, an at-large board member, has announced she won’t run this year.)
After the boundary vote, the board had a bitter pill to swallow: Pulling the plug, at least for now, on plans to launch an aviation-themed magnet at Waddell High in southwest Charlotte. The program sounded great to board members when it was introduced last fall. But it was never clear that the district had created a solid strategy for reopening Waddell, which had housed a K-8 magnet school and just went through a $5 million renovation to restore it to high school use. Applications for the aviation magnet fell far short of the number needed to start a new program.
That leaves CMS opening a full-size high school with only about 250 students in a special program for teens learning to speak English.
Nunn, whose district includes Waddell, said that, too, points to the need for a fresh look at assignment.
“We just came off of a vote where we were literally deciding boundaries for schools that are going to be at 100% capacity, and we have some schools that are sitting with open seats and magnet programs that we thought were desired but for some reason they are not filling up,” she said. “So I think this goes back to taking a fundamental look not only at our comprehensive plan but making sure that we have a solid magnet strategy.”
