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Last-Minute Revisions Made To Student Assignment Plan

Gwendolyn Glenn/WFAE
CMS board member Eric Davis talks to parents after a student assignment community meeting at Sedgefield Elementary

Some controversial parts of the proposed student assignment plan for Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools are being revised in preparation for a board vote on it Wednesday night.

The pairing of Sedgefield and Dilworth elementary schools has evoked a lot of criticism from Dilworth parents. The plan would still call for the schools to merge with K-2 grades at Sedgefield and third through fifth at Dilworth. Change would come at the middle school level.

Initially, under the plan these students were assigned to Sedgefield Middle, a struggling school where slightly over half of the students would be low income. Now the plan calls for changing the boundaries for Sedgefield Middle and Alexander Graham Middle School. Alexander Graham has a high income student body and it’s where Dilworth students now go.

Board member Eric Davis says the change “sets Sedgefield up in a better position for success and we wouldn’t have one school that’s predominately high income families and another school that’s predominately low, they would have similar student demographics.”

About half of students at each school would be high income and about a third would be low income.

“The challenge is with creating a plan for success at Sedgefield Middle that involves more families and is much more disruptive but on the whole appears to result in a better plan,” Davis said.

Clarification: Another revision is to the proposal involving Morehead STEM k-8 in the university area. Instead of breaking the full magnet school up between three schools, those grades would be spread only between Morehead and Nathaniel Alexander. They would be neighborhood schools that include the STEM magnet program. That part of the original proposal upset many Morehead parents. The grade levels at each school would be determined by the superintendent.

Gwendolyn is an award-winning journalist who has covered a broad range of stories on the local and national levels. Her experience includes producing on-air reports for National Public Radio and she worked full-time as a producer for NPR’s All Things Considered news program for five years. She worked for several years as an on-air contract reporter for CNN in Atlanta and worked in print as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun Media Group, The Washington Post and covered Congress and various federal agencies for the Daily Environment Report and Real Estate Finance Today. Glenn has won awards for her reports from the Maryland-DC-Delaware Press Association, SNA and the first-place radio award from the National Association of Black Journalists.