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Letter: Small size limits Carrboro High

Posted on July 17, 2008 by Staff

Your paper’s July 10th article on the reinstatement of some of the dropped AP courses at Carrboro High School is good news. However, the reintroduction of these courses for the coming year does not address the larger issue of the inevitable limitations posed by a small high school, apparently planned on the model of the national “small high school movement” heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

If, sadly, enrollment numbers are to be the principal determining factor in the number and level of course offerings and teacher assignments, it stands to reason that Carrboro High will never match the wealth of academic opportunities found in the other two schools, simply because they have more students. This unavoidable disparity was clearly not foreseen in the planning of Carrboro High School as a “small high school.” Nor was the downside of this fact made clear to a community which took redistricting in stride on the assumption that students assigned to the new school would have access to the same level of education that they would have received in the other two district high schools. That this has not turned out to be so is the core of the problem that students are facing this year, and will inevitably face in future years, unless more imaginative ways are found to share the instructional wealth among the district’s three high schools.

To be sure, some solutions have been offered to these problems: taking a course at another school or taking an online course. Students, it is claimed, “can apply to transfer to one of the district’s other high schools.” Well and good, if the parents can provide a car and gas money for transportation, because the school system will not. That this stand is clearly discriminatory does not seem to bother the administration at all. As for online courses, they are not available for all disciplines, and some have been reported as grossly unsatisfactory.

Much needs to be done if the pressing problem of academic equity is to be resolved among the district’s three high schools. This is a community that is clearly not willing to take second-best in one of its schools. Unfortunately, the size of Carrboro High School is itself a large part of the problem. Creative, long-term planning will have to be done to find ways of sharing academic offerings across the entire system — and the sooner the better!

William D. Ilgen
Chapel Hill

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