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NHCS Turnaround Task Force pitches a possible ‘Future Center,’ discusses barriers to pre-K

NHCS Turnaround Task Force members at their January 2025 meeting.
Rachel Keith
/
WHQR
NHCS Turnaround Task Force members at their January 2025 meeting.

The New Hanover County Schools Turnaround Task Force recently convened to discuss a possible Future Center, a hub for preparing students for life after high school, and ways to get families into pre-K.

New idea: Future Centers

The task force was organized in mid-2023 to help address New Hanover County's lowest-performing public schools. Task force member and retired NHCS educator Chris Furr presented the information he gleaned from conversations with other school districts on how they help prepare their students for life after high school. They settled on possibly making a ‘Future Center’ in New Hanover County Schools.

He first started with some statistics compiled from MyFutureNC. One was, “84% of NHC students said they intended to continue their education beyond graduation, but a year later, only 63% have, so why?” he asked.

Another data point was the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) completion: “We only have about 54% of our kids who are completing that, which is below the state average by about 10%,” he said. “What that really translates to is we have students who are not accessing money, [it’s] being left on the table every year.”

The district does have FAFSA nights for families planned on February 1 and March 11 (more information on the district’s Facebook page).

He added that 35% of the residents 25 to 44 in New Hanover County have no degree or credential in the workforce. MyFutureNC also identified the gaps in workforce development in transportation, health sciences, and business management.

A possible Future Center would focus on the three E’s: having students either enrolled, employed, or enlisted after high school. Furr and fellow task force members investigated models at Richmond City Schools and Lynchburg City Schools.

The Lynchburg Model, which members felt could be used in New Hanover, was supported by an endowment, but the school system provided the space for two centers, based at each of their high schools, each having a director.

Lynchburg High School counselors work alongside the Future Center. Furr reported that representatives from this center said that because of the program's creation, they went from 30% FAFSA completion to 70%. Future Center staff, he said, also make phone calls to colleges to help them waive fees that students can’t afford. They also have a $10,000 discretionary budget for testing and application fees.

NHCS Assistant Superintendent Julie Varnam said this program is needed as “the caseload of our counselors, especially in our traditional high schools, is pretty large, and the ability to provide intervention with 200 of your 500 kids on your caseload, that's not very doable, especially when we look at caseloads of other skilled professionals that are working with kids that need individualized support.”

Varnam told WHQR in an email that the districts’s traditional high schools all have five counselors except Laney, which has six. The non-traditional ones, like Isaac Bear, Sea-Tech, and Wilmington Early College, have one each. The district no longer has dedicated graduation coaches, but that work is absorbed into the counselor’s job, she wrote.

Another innovative idea, this one from Richmond City Schools, is to maintain a database of local employers with whom they connect students regarding internships and future jobs. Last year, the Richmond district said that 89% of their students were employed, enrolled, or enlisted in part for the efforts of the Future Center.

Information gathering on barriers to pre-K 

Part of a $120,000 grant Smart Start of New Hanover County received from the New Hanover Community Endowment will help inform the task force’s work on better serving pre-K families. Interviewers hired by Smart Start are planning to do a series of discussions with families on the barriers to accessing pre-K

“So they may be financial, cultural, or language,” Smart Start executive director Jane Morrow said. “Our goal is to interview 35-50 families with children ages 3-5.”

She said pre-K providers struggle with an issue: they can't always provide the community with quality care if they don’t get enough income to run their centers.

Varnam agreed that the stakes are high for those who work in the district when students are not kindergarten-ready.

“Those risk factors are occurring in those first 2,000 days, and [sometimes] the kid is not at the starting line when they're beginning kindergarten,” she said.

Morrow wrote in an email to WHQR, “We want people to know that the childcare system is complex and not able to meet all of the needs of our community. The cost of care is very high for many families while not providing sufficient revenue for many early education programs. This makes it challenging to recruit and retain qualified staff.”

She added, “Without staff, there can be shortages in available care, particularly for infants and toddlers. This, in turn, puts pressure on other businesses as parents cannot work if they do not have someone to care for their children. Smart Start wants to better understand our system's ‘pain points’ to work to seek lasting solutions.”

WHQR reporting on the task force

Rachel is a graduate of UNCW's Master of Public Administration program, specializing in Urban and Regional Policy and Planning. She also received a Master of Education and two Bachelor of Arts degrees in Political Science and French Language & Literature from NC State University. She served as WHQR's News Fellow from 2017-2019. Contact her by email: rkeith@whqr.org or on Twitter @RachelKWHQR