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After two years, the work of the NHCS Turnaround Task Force comes to a close

WHQR | By Rachel Keith

Published May 11, 2025 at 10:06 AM EDT

In the summer of 2023, New Hanover County Schools formed a task force to address consistently low scores at 12 schools around the district. The task force dug into the socio-economic and psychological backstory of the situation, and compiled best practices and potential solutions for the problems ailing about a quarter of our schools.

The task force had its first meeting in June 2023 and its last in April. Over the past two years, around 20 members reviewed the district’s academic performance metrics, discussed the impact of trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on student learning, and developed ideas to improve lower-performing schools.

Leaders of the task force say they felt like raised awareness of how poverty affects academic achievement and non-profits like Communities In Schools of Cape Fear got significant grants for programs (Full Service Community School model at Freeman, and the expansion of Freedom Schools summer program) that will help students. They’re also working on procuring funding for about $18 million in needs for schools with majority-minority populations and/or those with high free and reduced lunch populations. The group is continuing, just not under the school district's umbrella.

“There are three choices”

Scott Whisnant is a leader of the NHCS Turnaround Task Force and the former director of government affairs at New Hanover Regional Medical Center. He said that after two years, the school board and the community will have to choose one of three options.

The first option is to continue with the current neighborhood school model, in which about 25% of the district’s 45 schools lag behind their counterparts. The second is to redistrict the schools so that poverty is not concentrated in particular schools. The third is to put millions of extra dollars into those schools where poverty is concentrated.

“What we're trying to do is the third one. The second one is something that we can't do politically, and the first one is something morally we can't do,” he said.

However, Whisnant said that redistricting, if ever politically feasible, would be the quickest way to ensure “every school had a majority of parents who value education and have the means to support it, and that would change the culture in every school.”

But Whisnant later said task force members learned not to blame parents who work two or three jobs and don’t always have the means or time to support their children.

“They care a lot more than people want to give them credit for. Some of them are not wired to be able to help the way mine did, the way yours may have, but let's quit blaming them,” he said.

New Hanover County Commissioner and former school board member Stephanie Walker led the charge to create the task force. She said she ran for the school board in 2020 because of the disparate outcomes stemming from the neighborhood school model, which sends students to schools geographically closer to them. That model tends to concentrate students from lower socio-economic backgrounds at a few of the district's schools.

Whisnant used the example of Gregory International, pre- and post-neighborhood schools. In 2006, they were close to the 86th percentile for testing performance. Fast forward to 2016, and they were in the 2nd percentile. The school has recovered somewhat, reaching the 67th percentile, but it has not yet achieved the levels of success it saw prior to the neighborhood school model.

Walker said that the task force kept returning to the root issue of poverty, which can drive down school performance and achievement.

“There has to be buy-in and investment. And I even made the point, ‘You invest now or you pay later,’ and what do you want? We're doing a tremendous job attracting businesses here, and our growth is tremendous as well, but we can't leave students behind,” she said.

In the final report on the task force’s work, Whisnant wrote, “As a whole, NHCS functions well. In 2024, the district was ranked 17th among county systems in the state, based on end-of-grade scores. However, the variance within the schools has created essentially two experiences within the same system. The county and its residents cannot continue to tolerate this situation.” (*Note: You can find this final report at the end of this article.)

He added two poignant statistics to the report — ones that have been highlighted at most of the meetings over the past two years — that “Black children do not come within 46 points of White ones on any elementary school EOG. [...] Children receiving free or reduced lunch score 20-45 points lower than the overall student population.”

The conclusion is that the community is “failing minority children, especially those in poverty.”

The contention between proficiency and growth is ever-present

Throughout the two years, the task force’s discussions have consistently oscillated between proficiency (how well students score on end-of-grade tests) and growth (how much they improve from the beginning of the year until the end). Growth metrics are measured through SAS’s proprietary algorithm EVAAS.

NHCS district leaders and task force members agree that both are important; however, those who work in the district feel that they have more control over growth, which, in turn, they say, fosters proficiency.

However, tensions arise when the discussion of proficiency is on the table, particularly when the achievement rates of Black and White students are compared, but that doesn’t mean, according to Whisnant, that the district or the community can look away from it.

“To put it more bluntly, compare it to learning to swim. 10 means I can swim; 1 means I'm afraid of water. If I get you from 1 to 3, I’ll get you in the water, and you’ll duck your head [under], but when you get in the deep end, you're going to drown, because at some point, you've got to be proficient. However, that doesn't mean we live to teach to the test,” he said.

What’s next

The task force settled on addressing four main components of education: ensuring that every child entering kindergarten is at grade level, which would involve some form of universal pre-K; promoting literacy at all levels; fostering a positive culture in every classroom and school; and providing graduating seniors with access to college or trade certification programs.

While they won’t continue as a New Hanover County school board advisory committee, the group will still work on these four areas.

“A task force, by definition, is a short-term proposition. Our goal was to inform the school board of what the issues are, what you could do about them, and what it would cost. We've done that. [...] So from here, we're going to move into our own, either our nonprofit or live under the umbrella of something like Communities In Schools [of Cape Fear],” Whisnant said.

The task force’s final report allocated dollars to initiatives that either the school system or the community could undertake. Board Chair Melissa Mason said at an April agenda review meeting that the group would present at the June meeting.

The task force argues the need for 14 behavioral support specialists ($6.3 million over five years) for the district. This would touch on ensuring a positive school environment in each school. ACEs and trauma tend to show up more in those schools with high levels of poverty, so these would work to alleviate the demands on teachers.

The district has already adopted the Crisis Prevention Institute’s Reframing Behavior Training for all schools. This approach to dealing with behavior falls under the umbrella of Safe and Civil Schools. The task force said that to support more teachers and staff with student behavior, they are advocating for three coaches, which will require $1 million in funding over five years. They also want 10 multi-language family liaisons working in the district, which will cost $3.7 million over the next five years. The need for liaisons was a common refrain from principals who work with large student populations who speak English as a second language.

NHCS Turnaround Task Force on requests that the district or a future non-profit can make.

Whisnant also touted that Snipes Elementary is getting the Leader in Me program through district funds. Other schools in the district have this program, but their parent-teacher organizations pay for it. A district spokesperson said they are awaiting a contract for this, but it will likely come out of the state's ‘restart’ funds for one year. When WHQR asked repeatedly for a cost estimate, they did not respond.

For the community, the task force suggests it could fund 10 Communities In Schools specialists ($3.8 million over five years) and two early education navigators, who would help families enroll in pre-K programs ($750,000). A project lead for someone overseeing changes to early education would cost about $350,000. Beyond that, they aim to create a Future Center to ensure graduating seniors are enrolled in school, employed, or enlisted in the military. They also want to see investments in Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) support and have a project lead for post-graduation support in New Hanover County.

NHCS Turnaround Task Force on requests that the community or a future non-profit can make.

More specifically, the non-profit Friends of Public Schools plans to request $300,000 from The Endowment to be distributed among 10 schools where there is little to no parent-teacher association or organization to raise money for school supplies, field trips, and teacher recognition. (To show the extent of what PTAs can raise, for example, the top eight fundraising elementary schools averaged $74,000 in revenue in 2022.)

However, the question remains: who could fund the $18 million in requests?

The New Hanover County Commission has already signaled for this budget cycle that it won’t fund some of school district's additional requests — like $4 million for 42 school specialists. Those positions, about one for each school, would be flexible, with individual schools selecting the position they need, be it AIG, special needs, literacy or behavior coaches. At the school board’s April agenda review meeting, they acknowledged that the ask was sent to The Endowment since the commissioners wouldn’t support it.

The General Assembly still hasn’t formulated its budget, but some public educators are already saying it’s insufficient, especially regarding teachers’ salaries. The task force's next likely step will be to seek funding from philanthropic organizations such as The Endowment or Novant’s Foundation.

Whisnant said if the needle doesn’t move at all — and things stay the same a decade from now — he likely won’t be the one still trying to advocate for change.

“But we have a chance here to fix something that no one ever fixes. We have resources that no one ever has. Every community has this problem of disparate schools. I think we have it in the most extreme manner, probably in North Carolina; so we're the perfect test case to do it,” he said.

For example, elementary schools like Ogden, Masonboro, and Wrightsville Beach are in the 99th percentile for achievement, while Freeman and Forest Hills are in the 5th percentile or below. Forest Hills and Freeman both, though, met the growth metrics for their school report card grades compared to last year.

Final Report by Ben Schachtman on Scribd

Reporting on the NHCS Turnaround Task Force