By Jeremy Gerlach
Courtesy of the Carrboro Commons
Raleigh had its education lottery debate, Wake County had its neighborhood schools dilemma – now Chapel Hill-Carrboro is getting its moment in the spotlight of educational controversy.
Though the Howard and Lillian Lee Scholars Charter School could open its doors this August – pending a decision next week by the State Board of Education – for now those doors seem more like floodgates. The torrent of debates over the school has divided the public on both fiscal and racial issues.
Angela Lee, the charter school’s main proponent and lead applicant, is leading a team of reformers hoping to narrow the achievement gaps between white, black and Latino students, according to Lee’s application to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
Lee’s report states that in the 2009-10 school year, white students within Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools scored at least 35 percentage points higher on average than their black and Latino counterparts.
According to Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education Chair Mia Burroughs, the issues are complicated, and a charter school isn’t the best way to get at those issues.
“We want to serve the greatest number of kids in the greatest way,†she says. “The rest of the [school board] and I don’t believe a charter school is needed to help us get to that goal.â€
To alleviate crowding at the elementary school level and better serve students, a new elementary school is already on the way, scheduled to open its doors in the Northside neighborhood in August 2013.
While Lee could not be reached for comment, her colleague on the charter school’s board of directors, Stephanie Perry, says the new school would focus more on the achievement gap – an issue she says cannot be addressed by just adding another public school.
“One size does not fit all,†she says. “We can’t keep approaching [the achievement gap] in the same way, expecting different results.â€
Perry, a mother of two children in the CHCCS system – one in high school and another in elementary school – argues the charter school is not an attempt to corporatize education.
“This project has been carefully thought out, and it’s been a long time in the making,†she says. “I became involved with this project over a year ago because I felt that [the community] was just waiting to fix the problem – now, let’s just fix it.â€
Stephanie Knott, assistant superintendent for community relations for CHCCS, says the data the charter school’s board is using is too narrow.
“They only used one year, 2009-10, in their report,†she says. “When the school board looked at the data over three years, they found that the gap was already decreasing significantly.â€
In contrast to Lee’s stark 35 percent gap, Knott’s office found that from 2008-11, this gap decreased to 32.5 percent in reading proficiency and 12.3 percent in math scores.
Burroughs adds that the controversy over the charter school is racially tinged, and goes beyond the numbers. She says that Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP President Robert Campbell has even stepped in to write a letter to the State Board of Education opposing the proposed charter school.
Burroughs says she agrees with the sentiments of Campbell’s letter, which argues that the children of Chapel Hill and Carrboro carry the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation that lasted well into the 1970s. Her worry is that the charter school would siphon off minority students from the rest of the system.
“Our community fought so hard to desegregate in the ’60s,†she says. “I can’t think why we would want to undo that work.â€
Burroughs says the CHCCS board has already voted to send a letter to the state board of education and will await the results of the state’s meeting next Wednesday.
Jeremy Gerlach is a UNC student writing for the Carrboro Commons, a bi-weekly online lab newspaper for Jock Lauterer’s Community Journalism class at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.