Local commission says neighborhood schools hurting education in New Hanover County

NEW HANOVER COUNTY, NC (WWAY) — In the mid 2000s, an effort began in New Hanover County to shift students to neighborhood schools. Looking back 15 years later, has it been a success or a failure?

Scott Whisnant, member of the New Hanover County and City of Wilmington Community Relations Advisory Commission believes the latter. He presented the group’s findings in a virtual meeting Thursday night.

“This policy is not helping our overall school district,” Whisnant said. “In fact, relative to the rest of the state, we’re going backwards.”

In the 1990s, the district was forced by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to have between 15 and 50 percent African-American students in each school.

After that order expired, county residents elected a school board in the mid 2000s that supported a return to neighborhood schools. Whisnant says this is when things went downhill.

“That meant that the resources and the kids who come from families that most value education and have the most resources to contribute to their children’s education are concentrated in a handful of schools,” he said.

Citing data from Schooldigger.com, Whisnant showed that Parsley, Ogden and Wrightsille Beach Elementary Schools went from as high as 13.7 percent African-American students to no higher than 2.2 percent. Their rankings also jumped from 37, 81, and 63 respectively to the top ten in the state.

“You have three schools in the top ten, but so many other schools went backwards,” he said.

Data shows the percentage of African American students and white students in 2005 compared to 2019. It also shows where each school ranks statewide.
(Slide: NHC/City of Wilmington Community Relations Advisory Commission)

Elementary schools like Forest Hills and Freeman went from near-even numbers of white and African American students to as high as 81 percent African American students and as low as 5.6 percent white students. Their rankings also dropped by hundreds.

New Hanover County Schools as a whole dropped from 49th in the state to 91st. So what’s the solution? Whisnant says if the community at large changed its view on good schools versus bad schools, all schools in the county could be good.

“The elected leaders in our community have to say as a whole ‘we’re not going to stand for this,'” Whisnant said. “And then there could be enough change that no one has to worry about it being on the backs of my child or anybody else’s child, it would be a group effort within the community to fix this.”

Whisnant says he invited the current school board to attend Thursday night’s virtual presentation but it appears no one did. He also mentioned the new $1.25 billion community foundation funded by the hospital sale to Novant Health as a possible way to provide more resources to county schools.

The full presentation will be posted online next week.