New Hanover School board sets dates for redistricting talks

NEW HANOVER COUNTY, NC (WWAY) – New Hanover County school board members have a lot of work to do in not a lot of time. Following a stalemate with redistricting high schools in the 2018-2019 school year, the board now has to look at combining high schools and middle school redistricting.

Maps are being reworked, but are mostly complete for high school redistricting. That’s according to the school assistant superintendent of operations Eddie Anderson who presented at the monthly board work session held Wednesday.

Board members decided on draft time lines for the redistricting process at the work session.

“We want to implement that for the 2019 school year,” said Anderson referring to middle schools. “We have to have that Middle School plan by sometime at the end of this year or the beginning of next year.”

The board decided on elementary school redistricting time lines that, nonetheless, will begin in the 2020-2021 school year when projects such as Porter’s Neck elementary are complete. Board members plan to issue drafts of redistricting for elementary schools in January of 2019. Superintendent Tim Markley adding that the re-drawings should cover the entire district and not solely the areas in the north part of the county impacted by the new school.

That will carry the school board into a public input phase that they’d hope to complete and vote on the elementary redistricting come August of 2019.

The immediate issue is overcrowding in the middle and high schools.

“Senior privilege, are you going to do all of these, junior privilege,” asked vice chairwoman Jeanette Nichols.

School board staff say the high school redistricting will include senior privilege but nothing else. Students seeking to apply for special programs at any of the four high schools will be unaffected.

For example, an upcoming freshman applies and is approved to go to Hoggard, but they do not live in the district, that will not be impacted according to board members and that student will go to Hoggard. This was a scenario board member Don Hayes brought up to colleague David Wortman.

Board members decided to have high school as well as middle school redistricting maps ready for review by their July work session. That will be set for the middle of that month. Following that, they plan to publicize the maps before beginning public input in August.

“We’ve got to hit this March 2019 student assignment date,” Anderson said.

The school board plans to have public input from August of this year, but have given themselves a short schedule. Ideally, board members say they want to vote on Middle and High school redistricting come November.

A key topic brought up in the May work session was what if they backed away from redistricting all together. Anderson presented to the board that they would then need to acquire multiple mobile classroom units for middle school and high school placements. That is estimated to cost the school district $4 million.