School Board Members Appointed
On Tuesday, March 12, Asheville City Council appointed two new members to replace outgoing city school board Chairman Gene Bell and Vice Chairman Al Whitesides, both of whom have served the maximum two consecutive four-year terms. Member Peggy Dalman, who has served a single term, was reappointed, and two parents of city school students, Leah Ferguson and Matt Buys, were named to fill the other seats.
Committed to Improvement
All the candidates for seats to replace Bell and Whitesides were committed to continued improvement in graduation rates v. dropout rates.
During her first term, Dalman led the strategic planning team that brought in stakeholders from throughout the community to work with the board to create both a vision for the school system’s future and a metric to accomplish the goals that were set. In her second term she hopes to implement the plan’s goal of raising the achievement of all students: helping those who are struggling with reading and math, raising student
engagement through more enrichment activities, and offering a challenging curriculum to high-achieving students.
Matt Buys, a stay-at-home dad with four children who was appointed to the board, is particularly interested in helping lower-performing students. In his application he wrote, “Too often children who live in areas directly impacted by poverty and crime find that high-quality education is not available to them.”
Pointing out that his son performed with the Asheville High School band at the presidential inauguration last January, he added, “I could not help but wonder if President Obama noticed that only two minority students played an instrument as they marched proudly along.” Buys, who has also produced several documentaries, helped found Parents for Asheville Middle School last school year to lobby and work for change at the school.
Leah Ferguson, the final appointee made by City Council, works as the lead coordinator for the Community Transformation Project of WNC with the Buncombe County Health Department. She served on the strategic plan task force with Dalman and is equally determined to implement the strategic plan. The West Asheville resident, whose seven-year-old son attends Vance Elementary School, is the former co-director of the Asheville City Schools Foundation, and currently serves as vice president of advocacy for the nonprofit Children First/Communities in Schools.
New Schools, New Statistics
During the eight years that Bell and Whitesides served, the Asheville City Schools system has developed a strategic plan for reshaping the system and undertaken plans to build two new schools to replace 50-year-old Isaac Dickson Elementary at a cost of $20 million and 60-year-old Asheville Middle School ($46.9 million). Last year Buncombe County allocated $2 million to be used for planning, but the County Commission has not yet determined what money it will provide for actual construction.
Money for school construction is allocated based on school populations within the city and county, and the commission is charged with distributing money both to city and county schools. Because the county schools have so many more students than city schools, the city has received very little money for new schools over the past 20 years in comparison with the county schools.
But city schools have good news to share, according to Superintendent Allen Johnson. Dropout rates and acts of violence and crime in city schools have diminished noticeably in the past few years. According to recently reported numbers released by the school board, fewer students dropped out of Asheville High, SILSA, and the Randolph Learning Center in 2011-12 than in any of the previous 15 years, while the number of acts of crime and violence declined by nearly one-third.
However, suspensions reported among district students increased by about 12% over the previous year.
“Four years of steady declines in our dropout rate is a good indicator that the aggressive steps we are taking to promote the value of education are gaining traction. Our teachers, staff and community agencies, alike, have embraced the ‘college-going culture’ that we promote day in and day out. But we will never be satisfied until that dropout number becomes negligible,” Johnson said when the numbers were released. The Superintendent keeps a chart of annual dropout numbers on the back of his office door.
