School board election hits hot buttons

By Patricia E. Matson
Thursday, October 14, 2010

Among numerous points of contention in the New Hanover County Board of Education election, redistricting remains one of the hottest topics, but all candidates agree it’s a done deal. Even opponents say it would cause too much turmoil to revisit the issue before growth and demographic shifts make it necessary again.

Three years ago, the school board redistricted elementary students with a focus on neighborhood schools. A year ago, due to the opening of Holly Shelter Middle School, redistricting occurred once more.

Advocates say neighborhood schools foster more parental involvement, and critics say they have resulted in wide racial/socioeconomic disparities between the schools.

Of the eight candidates running for four open seats on the school board, three are Republican incumbents who voted for the redistricting plan.

Janice Cavenaugh, a real estate appraiser, has been on the board 19 years. School board chairman Don Hayes, a sales representative and Navy veteran, and Edward Higgins, a law instructor at Cape Fear Community College, have both served on the board for 16 years.

The other Republican in the race, Dr. Derrick Hickey, said Tuesday that his scientific training as an orthopaedic surgeon would bring a facts-based approach to the school board in setting policies and measuring performance in students and teachers. He also said that as the only parent in the race with a child in the school system, he has seen that it’s necessary to change the culture and make administrators and staff more responsive.

Nick Rhodes is the Democratic incumbent running for re-election. A retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and management consultant, Rhodes is finishing his first four-year term. He voted against neighborhood-based redistricting and called it disastrous, but he said it would be too disruptive to redo. His main focus for the future is implementing the strategic plan his subcommittee has developed to raise academic proficiency to 85 percent, develop business and community partnerships with at least half of the schools, and have 21st century technology integrated into all classrooms by 2013.

The other three Democrats in the race are Joyce Huguelet, Philip Stine and Clancy Thompson.

Huguelet has been an educator for about 50 years, retiring as principal of Winter Park Elementary school in 2005. Stine is the founder of a management and planning consultancy group and has served on the Child Advocacy Commission of the Lower Cape Fear and the African American Heritage Foundation of Wilmington. Thompson has taught high school and college, has worked with Fred Rogers and has been executive director of the Child Advocacy Commission for a decade.

Another issue in the race is school population—overcrowded campuses versus underutilized facilities. Holly Shelter Middle School, built for 918 students, had 616 enrolled on Sept. 9. Cavenaugh, Hayes and Higgins said it was designed that way to accommodate future growth.

Hayes added that parents had opted out of underperforming schools and the numbers would go back to normal eventually. He added that older schools had been designed without elements like art and music rooms, so mobile units, or trailers, helped meet modern needs.

Hickey said the trailer argument was just a way to push a busing agenda, and although the current redistricting plan was a horrible result of a dysfunctional board, the trailers are there because those schools are where parents want their children.

Rhodes spoke of the inefficiency of having empty seats and empty buildings in the system while spending money on trailers.

"It’s ludicrous from any business perspective you can imagine," said Thompson, adding that it wasn’t in the best interest of either children or financial stewardship.

Huguelet said the situation was a huge problem and would keep getting more extreme, with parents scrambling to send their children to desirable high-performance schools rather than the poorer performers. Her top priority if elected would be to reverse the trend so that all schools would be high-performing, through teacher support and training and talking to principals.

Stine said he saw the three areas of greatest need as being the high dropout rate (over a third of New Hanover County students), the achievement gap for socioeconomically disadvantaged students, and vocational/technical training for students who aren’t headed to college.

Thompson agreed there needed to be more vocational training and said there needed to be more emphasis on early childhood education. He also wanted curriculum audits and financial audits of the school system.

Higgins said he was proud of redistricting, creating two additional magnet schools, improvement in Adequate Yearly Progress test scores and maintaining a quality school system during trying financial times. He said his first priority in the next four years would be to develop programs to help socioeconomically disadvantaged students be more successful.

Hayes said his proudest accomplishment on the board so far has been providing choices for parents in the education of their children, including magnet schools, year-round schools and the Open Choice enrollment program. Beyond continuing that, he wants to work with the new superintendent, Tim Markley, to set goals and address the dropout rate and the achievement gap between white and black children.

Cavenaugh said she too would work to eliminate the achievement gap and was also proud of the board’s work in developing magnet and year-round schools—and pointed to progress at the Rachel Freeman School of Engineering, where proficiency test scores have risen from 40 percent to almost 70 percent in three years—as well as preschool education.

Hickey said his priorities were to increase parental involvement and to work on the achievement gap. Ideas included evaluating teachers based on their students’ performance, not just observations by principals, adding merit bonuses and encouraging their professional development.

Rhodes said far too many decisions had been made on an ad hoc basis rather than through a strategic plan. He said implementation of the plan will be the tough part, and he’d like to be a part of that.

"The key thing to protect is instruction delivery; everything else is in support," he summarized.