Today on the Newsroom: a look at New Hanover County’s 12 low-performing schools.
Many of these are low-income schools with disproportionately high numbers of Black and Hispanic students — a symptom of the county’s deeply segregated school policies.
But improving these schools’ ranking has proven a thorny issue and traditional approaches like increasing per-student funding and reducing teacher-student ratios have helped, but not fixed the issue.
That’s in part due to the fact that students at many of these schools are dealing with high levels of ACES — adverse childhood experiences — essentially, types of childhood trauma that can have serious impacts on health and wellbeing.
ACEs also have a clear impact on student performance. Because, frankly, kids dealing with domestic and gang violence in and around their homes, substance abuse, food and housing insecurity, and poverty aren’t going to have the levels of focus and attention of kids who aren’t.
Those ACEs can also mean trouble regulation emotional responses to stress — and some pretty bad behavior in the classroom.
And, while young students are struggling with all this, teachers are struggling with maintaining discipline and trying to keep grades up. You layer those extremely challenging conditions on top of major changes affecting the workforce nationwide, and the mounting financial pressures of inflation and the affordable housing crisis — and you can see how recruiting and retaining talented teachers and staff to these schools could be incredibly difficult.
It’s a tough situation — and a tough story to report on, because the problem involves some racially charged data, the disparities between how Black and white students are performing, for example, or the struggle to keep staff at low-performing schools that have high Black student populations.
Cutting through stereotypes and getting to the root of the issue, and then dealing with it — well, that’s going to take work.
But there’s some good news — in the form of a recently formed task force, designed to do that work. Now, I know the phrase ‘task force’ doesn’t necessarily always inspire confidence. To be blunt, it’s sometimes the reactionary move government makes instead of actually dealing with a problem.
WHQR’s Rachel Keith got to sit in the turnaround task force’s first meeting. She came back from the meeting optimistic, telling me the conversation was candid — always a good start — and productive. And there are some heavy hitters on the task force, including elected officials and important stakeholders.
Links:
- NHCS Low-performing school improvement plan
- NHCS forms task force to address its lowest-performing schools
Task force members:
