Administrators in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools district reversed an earlier decision to split a program for high-performing middle schoolers.
LEAP, which stands for Learning Environment for Advanced Programming, serves selected students in Chapel Hill and Carrboro Schools who consistently perform two grade levels above their own. All LEAP middle schoolers from Chapel Hill and Carrboro study at Smith Middle School.
Previously, school administrators had decided to send some rising LEAP sixth graders to Phillips Middle School for 2015-16 to relieve overcrowding at Smith. Last week, parents got a letter from administrators saying the district would keep all the LEAP students at Smith next year.
“We have recently received new projections that indicated a slowing of growth and the need for our next middle school to be further off than expected (not until 2023),” the letter from Superintendent Tom Forcella, Assistant Superintendent Todd LoFrese and Assistant Superintendent Magda Parvey says. “This latest information has caused us to rethink the approach to LEAP for next year.”
About 75 people came to a Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools board meeting before the recent decision. The majority were students, and parents and supporters of LEAP students. Many protested the previous decision to split the program.
The program is for students in grades four through eight. The school board did not make either decision: to split the program or to keep the program at Smith.
Imagine going to a new school unexpectedly and leaving all your friends; you would feel lost, said student Paul Lyerly at the board meeting.
“And some people when they’re lost they just want to hide in the bathroom all day,” Lyerly said. “Why would you want all the best LEAP kids to hide in a bathroom when they could be learning?”
Parents said they did not have a say in the decision to split the program. And several people expressed concern that boys outnumber girls in the program and that all thirteen students reassigned to Phillips were boys.
On the other hand, some said the split would be beneficial to the school system as a whole. Dianne Jackson, a media specialist at Glenwood Elementary School, said the fresh start at Phillips could give an opportunity to bring more racial diversity to the program.
“I came to the district in the early eighties and upon arriving, became a member of the newly formed Blue Ribbon Task Force whose charge was to examine the performance of African American students,” said Jackson. “Notable is that I have been involved in that work in my thirty plus years in this district.”
Jackson said she has seen few black and Latino students in academically gifted programs in her years of work in the school district. She said factors that influence underrepresentation of minority students in these programs include a lack of referrals to the program, teachers and students’ beliefs, and culturally biased tests.
Wake County Schools has partnered with Duke University to identify more minority and low-income children for gifted programs, the News and Observer reported in December. This could help point the way for area school districts.
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