What Gets Your Attention When It Comes to Our Schools?

This is Sharon Kebschull Barrett of the Chapel Hill/Carrboro PTA Council. What gets your attention when it comes to our schools?

This year, voters face important choices, with eight people running for four seats on the school board. The PTA Council, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP, and the Special Needs Advisory Council, along with WCHL, are sponsoring a forum for the candidates on October 12 at 7 pm in Chapel Hill Town Hall, and we want to know—what concerns you the most? At the PTA Council, we hear worries about challenging budgets, serious repair needs in our schools, and anxiety about having enough great teachers, great instruction, and real transparency in decision-making by the school board and administration.

And we and the NAACP know the community continues to be alarmed by the schools’ achievement gaps and significant discipline disparities along racial lines. We have serious problems with getting all our students to reach even the minimal standard of proficiency—for example, only 39 percent of economically disadvantaged students, 42 percent of African-American students, and 47 percent of Latino students are proficient, compared with 90 percent proficiency for the district’s white students, among the best in the state.

Students with special needs also remain a focus—only 32 percent of students with disabilities test as proficient. The schools need to continue focusing on how to help students with disabilities have access to mainstream education, or, when that’s not possible, to have a structured curriculum in separate classrooms that helps them continue to grow. The district’s “growth mindset” needs to be more than just words, but action that extends to everyone.

This is already a long list of concerns facing the school board, but it only begins to touch on all the issues we hear discussed—and we know you probably have many more. So tell us what you’d like asked at the forum! Submit questions today here.

Our groups will each choose a third of the pre-planned questions for the evening, and we’ll take other questions from the audience that night. We look forward to seeing you there—and thank you, WCHL, for your participation! For all the forum’s sponsors, this is Sharon Kebschull Barrett.

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