Charter School Likely Coming To Chapel Hill

Tuesday, February 21 2012 by Dave DeWitt

Eric Hodge: A new charter school may open in Chapel Hill next year. If approved by the State Board of Education, The Howard and Lillian Lee Scholars Academy would open in a new building and serve students in kindergarten through fifth grade – with possible expansion into middle school down the road. Its stated mission is to close the achievement gap – to help African-American students raise their performance on standardized tests. That will, in turn, improve graduation rates, and lead to greater college readiness.

The Lee Charter School proposal is causing educators and parents in Chapel Hill to pick sides, splitting a community that places a high value on public education.

As part of our American Graduate series, Dave DeWitt reports.

Dave DeWitt: By almost any measure, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools are the best in the state. The students there score the highest on tests, they earn awards and win academic contests. The district taxes more, and pays the most for their teachers. They offer Chinese immersion in elementary school and a wide array of AP courses in high school.

But one problem has been persistent – the achievement gap between white and black students. And that’s what Angela Lee wants to fix.

Angela Lee: We believe the students that we particularly want to see succeed really, really, really do their best and achieve their potential, may do better in the charter school environment.

Angela Lee is spearheading the effort to create the Howard and Lillian Lee Scholars Academy. It’s named after her parents. Howard was the first African-American mayor of Chapel Hill and is the former chair of the state school board – and why that’s important will be clear in a moment. Lillian spent three decades as an educator in the Chapel Hill public schools.

Angela Lee says parents in and around Chapel Hill are anxious for the charter school to open. But there are some in town who aren’t…

Rev. Robert Campbell: And I don’t see how taking that kind of money out of the school system would benefit the educational process here in Chapel Hill Carrboro.

Reverend Robert Campbell is with the Chapel Hill branch of the NAACP. He points out that the achievement gap has, in fact, narrowed in recent years in the district. African-American students in Chapel Hill also outperform African-American students throughout the state.
But Campbell’s concerns go beyond just test scores. He says if it opens with its goal of 400-plus students – and most of them are African-American – in the relatively small Chapel Hill-Carrboro School district - it will create a two-tiered system along racial lines – with white students in the public schools and Black students in the charter school.

Campbell: We are creating a free-standing institution that is creating a form of segregation.

When the Lee Charter School proposal first landed on Tom Forcella’s desk, he had a similar reaction. He’s been the superintendent in Chapel Hill for less than a year – and worries what will happen if his budget loses 2-to-4 million dollars in per-pupil funding.

Tom Forcella: Will there be some savings because you’ll need less staff if that many students go? Some, but it doesn’t equate to the amount of money that we would probably lose.

The Chapel Hill schools may be forced to cut some longstanding and effective programs that serve minority and low-income students. And Forcella, who came here from Connecticut, also wonders why the system is designed to be so antagonistic.

Forcella: There’s never as part of the process, a preliminary conversation between the individuals who want to start a charter school and the public school.

Doing battle with the public schools and the NAACP is not what those behind the Lee Charter School say they want to be doing.

Danita Mason-Hogans is on the school’s Board of Directors. She says the school will not target just African-American children.

Danita Mason-Hogans: We don’t want African-American, white, students or anyone else to say in a public school system that isn’t working for them. For us, the larger issue and the bigger picture is offering an alternative for those students.

The topic of possible segregation didn’t come up when a State School Board committee discussed fast-track approval for the Lee Charter School last month. The members were more concerned with how the school would build a new building in just five months in Chapel Hill – a notoriously difficult place to build. And they also asked questions about the for-profit company that will manage the school – National Heritage Academies.

But even those concerns are unlikely to overcome politics.

Howard Lee once sat where they are now, on the State Board of Education – and he still wields tremendous influence. Enough that a charter school bearing his name very likely will be approved when the full Board votes on March first.

How the school – and the fight to get it started - will affect Howard Lee’s legacy, is less certain.

This story is part of the American Graduate Project series.

Dropping Back In

Friday, December 16 2011 by Dave DeWitt

David Brower: North Carolina’s high school graduation rate is inching up. For the first time last year, the state ranked better than the national average. But still, about 1 in 4 high school students in the state drops out. And in a knowledge-based economy, those without at least a high school diploma are highly likely to struggle the rest of their lives.

As part of WUNC’s American Graduate Project, Dave DeWitt reports on one of the innovative schools focused on improving graduation rates.

Dave DeWitt: It’s quiet in the hallways of the Performance Learning Center in East Durham. But not too quiet. This, everyone says, is just how it is. Quiet in the hallways. Quiet in the main office. Even quiet in the classrooms, where – by design - teachers don’t stand in front of the class and lecture, but instead offer one-on-one guidance to each student as she or he sits in front of a computer.

This is the PLC model. Every student taking whatever online course or courses they need to graduate. So in a single math classroom, one student over here might be taking algebra 2, while a couple others over there are taking calculus, and so on.

Tianna Miles has sat in front of one of these computers for three years. She says she struggled her freshman year at Durham’s Northern High School and by the middle of her sophomore year, she was gone.

Tianna Miles: It’s too much freedom at Northern. I needed a smaller area, more rules and discipline and stuff. I was kind of bad, a couple years ago.

But Tianna ended up at the Performance Learning Center, because she knew she had to.

Miles: You need an education to get somewhere in life. They won’t even hire you at McDonald’s without a diploma.

Tianna did fine for a while, and then her father died her senior year and she failed the 12th grade. Her story is like many of the students at PLC. They deal with difficult family lives at home and come here after having already dropped out at one of the large, comprehensive high schools.

Sara Carucci is a graduation coach at PLC.

Sara Carucci: They get what they’re going after. They know that it’s hard. Hard enough to have failed at once. So without PLC, I know that a lot of them would never have had the opportunity to come back, because it’s very rare that students will re-enroll in a traditional school.

There are about 60 Performance Learning Centers across the country. 5 are in North Carolina. They’re public-private partnerships. Durham Public Schools pays for the building and the teachers, while a non-profit group called Communities in Schools pays for graduation coaches and other support personnel.

Bud Lavery is the Durham group’s executive director.

Bud Lavery: A lot of this idea is to give them a lot more of a small setting, so there’s a very personal relationship side. A lot of time we underestimate how important that connection level is for teenagers. We think they’re trying to get away from the adults, but they actually kind of crave that personal attention.

More than 400 students drop out every year in Durham alone. Most students who leave school never come back. The rate is worse in other places in the state, especially rural areas where programs like this are too expensive.

About 120 students attend the Performance Learning Center in Durham, a couple dozen or so will graduate at various points during the year.

Tianna will be one of them. She repeated the 12th grade this year and will graduate - just as she promised her dying father she would.

Miles: He died, like, but he already knew that I had failed. But I told him that I was going to pass, so I figured I could go and put everything I had into it, and do it. I’ll be done with school in four days.

After she graduates, Tianna says she plans to work a little while and then attend North Carolina Central and major in child development.

This story is part of the American Graduate Project series.

Background Information about the high school graduation rates in NC

Fifty years ago, few in education cared about graduation rates. Many students dropped out and were able to get well-paying jobs in the furniture or textile industries. But now, those jobs are gone forever, and graduating from high school has become a bare minimum requirement in the knowledge-based economy. 

Like many states, North Carolina was slow to adapt. Until several yeas ago, the state's graduation rate ranked near the bottom nationally. But lately, those numbers have improved. According to the annual Diplomas Count report from Education Week magazine, last year was the first time North Carolina's graduation rate was better than then national average. Educators and policy makers point to several efforts, from Truancy Courts in Halifax County to a Performance Learning Center in Durham that lets at-risk students learn online and on their own schedule, as reasons for the improvement.

More still needs to be done, especially in rural and urban areas, and for African-American males and Latino students, because the rates are still unacceptable: Just 50% of African-American students graduate from high school in four years; only one-third of Latino students earn diplomas. That is the equivalent of 131 students quitting every school day. And the Alliance for Excellent Education reports that, for just one year of dropouts from the class of 2009, North Carolina will fail to benefit from $12 billion in lost lifetime earnings from students who failed to graduate.