Board to apply for academy funding

The city school board voted unanimously Thursday to apply for a $26,000 grant to create a plan for splitting the district’s third high school into two separate academies.

The proposal is markedly different from the high school reform plan the board approved last April, which recommended the development of opt-in academies within traditional high school environments.

Under the new proposal, students at the new high school, scheduled to open in Carrboro in fall 2007, would be required upon enrolling to choose either an academy for international studies or an academy for science and technology.

“The administration believes that the two academies are diverse enough in nature to allow students to be comfortable, and hopefully excited, about their choice,” Superintendent Neil Pedersen stated in a recent memorandum to the school board.

But if students are not interested in either academy, Pedersen said they could choose to transfer to either of the two other high schools, which offer optional academies of interest — an option that would require revising the district’s transfer policy.

The choice of fields for the third high school’s academies reflects a reform agenda driven by the granting foundation, the New Schools Project, an initiative of the North Carolina Education Cabinet and a major conduit for high school reform funding.

The NSP, backed by an $11 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to restructure high schools to create smaller learning environments, which it hopes will better prepare students for college and careers.

To qualify for NSP funding, schools must follow a list of non-negotiable criteria. Most notably, the academies must operate as autonomous schools rather than the district’s current school-within-a-school model — a requirement that worried board member Jamezetta Bedford.

“I would want to know what that part of our community’s response would be,” she said. “This is a very big change from optional academies. It’s very crucial that we are up front with this group.”

While the two academies would be organized under one school and one principal, they would operate separately in many respects, Pedersen said.

“For the most part, the 400 students in each school would be educated together in that there would be limited interaction across schools academically,” Pedersen said, citing extracurricular activities as an area in which students would be able to interact.

Board member Nick Didow said he was very comfortable with the idea of creating academies and suggested expanding the proposal to include duplicate academies at the other high schools, as well as additional academies in areas like performing arts and economic and social justice.

“My thought in looking over this is that it didn’t go far enough,” Didow said.

Pedersen said the grant would simply give the district a chance to plan and that there was no guarantee that it would stick with the models set forth by the NSP to qualify for implementation funding, which could amount to $200,000.

“It’s not so much money that we would want to run into problems down the road.”

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.