School board evaluates year

While some of the city schools’ priorities for next school year are exciting local advocates, a perennial concern is giving them fits.

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro Board of Education began its annual planning retreat Monday by lauding plans for high school reform but criticized the district’s ongoing minority achievement gap.

“We’re no further along this year than last year,” board Vice Chairwoman Liz Carter said of the achievement gap. “We’re struggling to do what we’re supposed to do every day: educate children.”

Nettie Collins-Hart, assistant superintendent for instructional services, and Diane Villwock, director of testing and program evaluation, were peppered with questions regarding the district’s minority achievement, as evaluated in last month’s district report card on black and Latino student progress.

“In a district that prides itself on education for all, I don’t know what to say to minority students who don’t get help,” Carter said after the presentation.

Collins-Hart and Villwock were reluctant to accept some board members’ assertion that the district was letting kids down.

Collins-Hart pointed to the section of the report card that shows that the district continued closing gaps between black and white students last year, including a 7 percent reduction in the mean gap in reading for third through eighth grades.

“If you analyze the data, the question is whether we are doing the best things to implement and achieve our goals,” Collins-Hart told the board, adding that the gap is closing, but not fast enough.

Increasing tutoring opportunities and having more curriculum monitoring from school principals were offered as ways to close the gap.

But Carter said she didn’t want to be discussing the same “abysmal” gap in test scores next year. “Other districts don’t have as many resources or the capable staff that we do, and they’re doing more,” she said.

Discussion surrounding the district’s efforts in high school reform was less divisive.

Sherri Martin, director of secondary education programming, said the district’s primary goals in reform are increasing collaboration with other districts, increasing the diversity of current learning academies and coordinating curriculums with the schedule change.

The school board voted in December to create a hybrid block schedule that would consist of seven 50-minute periods, some of which could be combined to 100-minute periods lasting for either a semester or the entire school year.

Martin said the proposal for curriculum changes under the new system has been sent to each school.

Only courses that are not segmented will be adapted to the block schedule, Martin said.

Advanced Placement, career and technical education, math, and foreign language courses will remain under the same schedule.

Regarding collaboration, Martin and board members alike praised the district and Orange County.

Citing recent developments such as the middle college program — a new high school at Durham Technical Community College that will open to both city and county school students this fall — board members called this year’s collaboration unprecedented.

“By next planning retreat, we hope to have lots of results,” Martin said of the district’s reform efforts.

The district’s nutrition policy and planning for high school No. 3 were also mentioned and will be revisited today.

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.