Ann Doss Helms

Almost everyone who lives in Mecklenburg County has opinions about the school board: Whether they make the right student assignment decisions, whether they're building schools in the right places, why they can't seem to keep a superintendent.

But when it comes time to vote for members, that's another matter.

The town of Cornelius is poised to come out of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools penalty box when it comes to school construction.

Competition with charter schools may have played a role in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ enrollment slump this year, a district official says. But while some schools came in under projections, some are growing fast. 

Some south Charlotte residents hope a change in superintendents this summer will give them a new shot at revising plans for two new schools in their area.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools seemed locked in on plans for those schools: A high school scheduled to open in 2023 and a K-8 school, informally known as Rea Farms, slated to open in 2020. 

Thirty-one days into the school year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is warning families that their kids have to have lunch money unless they've qualified for free meals.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has seen its first significant enrollment drop, according to a report posted Monday. And the district’s Hispanic enrollment hit a milestone as well. 

Updated 3:15 p.m. Monday: The board has postponed the selection of an equity committee to its Oct. 22 meeting because board Chair Mary McCray is ill, the district announced Monday afternoon.  

No pay. No authority. Lots of data to digest and a mission that has stymied some of America's best thinkers.

You might think serving on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools equity committee would be a hard sell. But 284 people have applied, and the school board must figure out how to choose up to 40 of them Tuesday.

For a few hours this week, the town of Huntersville seemed poised to vote on a resolution endorsing a separate school district for northern Mecklenburg County.

Walk into any classroom for gifted students in North Carolina and you’ll probably see mostly white and Asian faces. Those students are seven or eight times as likely to be labeled academically gifted as black students, and five or six times as likely as Hispanic ones.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has a new deputy superintendent in charge of academics – basically the guy who makes sure 150,000 students learn to read when they’re young and eventually graduate as capable, well-rounded teens.

Average SAT scores for the Charlotte region's class of 2019 ranged from 1240 at Providence High, a large public school in southeast Charlotte, to 861 at Charlotte Learning Academy, a small, struggling charter school that closed at the end of the year.

Last year four suburban towns and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools were locked in a ferocious clash. Today it’s more like a wary truce. 

When the district's Municipal Education Advisory Committee met to talk about school safety Thursday morning, it was almost hard to recall the drama of 2018.

Jarod Brown loves the sunlight streaming into his new automotive technology classroom at North Mecklenburg High. But even with the natural light he insisted on when Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools designed the building, you can tell his students can’t wait to get away from their desks and into the shop.

A south Charlotte middle school teacher has launched a drive to get aid to a tiny island school hard hit by Hurricane Dorian. She says she learned an important lesson from last year's hurricane aid effort.