Donevin Hoskins, a former Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools administrator now working in Guilford County, was named principal of West Charlotte High on Tuesday.
Hoskins left CMS in 2010, after serving as principal of one of the five schools that were part of Olympic High and assistant principal at Vance and Waddell high schools. He currently leads Smith High School in Greensboro.
Hoskins steps into one of the highest-profile principal jobs in Charlotte. West Charlotte, a black high school in the days of Jim Crow, came to symbolize the best of CMS' desegregation efforts in the 1970s and 1980s. In recent years it became an icon of resegregation, returning to a mostly black student body — and very high poverty levels — under the current system of neighborhood schools and magnets.
West Charlotte has also been the focus of ongoing efforts to boost test scores and graduation rates, including the public-private Project LIFT. And the school community is working with CMS staff to design a new building that will replace the old one off Beatties Ford Road in 2022.
Hoskins succeeds Timisha Barnes-Jones, who was the CMS principal of the year when she resigned this summer to work for the Savannah-Chatham County public school system in Georgia.
