And Tuesday's news, where Mecklenburg county were denied their basic rights to speak as citizens on the issue.
http://www.news14charlotte.com/content/special_edition/back_to_school/?AC=&ArID=91238&SecID=124
Deconsolidation bill voted down again
By: Tim Boyum, News 14 Carolina
RALEIGH, N.C. -- In what became a hairy meeting Tuesday, state lawmakers again shot down a bill that would allow Mecklenburg County voters to decide whether the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district should be deconsolidated.
At the request of House Speaker Jim Black, members of the House Education Committee had agreed to reconsider the referendum bill sponsored by Mecklenburg Reps. John Rhodes and Jim Gulley. The committee had voted against it 35-1 on Thursday.
But Tuesday's vote, which was carried out after local parents had a chance to speak, garnered only an additional 3 votes.
During the meeting, two Mecklenburg County leaders nearly had to be escorted from the room.
Members of the House Education Committee heard from parents who say Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools should be deconsolidated.
At the beginning of the meeting, the committee's chairman, Marvin Lucas, said that no elected officials or residents outside of Mecklenburg County would be permitted to speak. But the first two speakers were elected officials.
School board member Larry Gauvreau and County Commissioner Jim Puckett tried to make their cases anyway. After the committee told the two men to sit down, they continued to talk. Eventually, officials turned off the microphone.
After things calmed down, several parents stood up and said that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district is too big to sufficiently serve the county. They said residents should have the option of breaking up the district.
“I feel that if you don't give us the opportunity to vote in our county and have people speak up, the debate will end,” parent Christine Pinardis said.
Larry Bumgarner, a community activist who has run for the school board before, tried to persuade the committee as well.
“I represent about 1,200 people,” Bumgarner said. “If you look at the table over there, you'll read the horror stories people have written in the petitions.”
Many parents are frustrated with overcrowding and other issues in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. They want to see CMS broken up into smaller districts.
“Just yesterday, our Chamber of Commerce Executive Committee met and voted unanimously to oppose this piece of legislation,” said John Brown of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.
Despite the vote, parents in favor of deconsolidation said they will not give up.
Joe White, the chairman of the CMS school board, hopes they will at least try to move forward.
“I hope, at least for the present time, we can put this to rest and we can go back home and devote our energies, time, and resources to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district," White said.
Several legislators, including Rhodes, said they plan to complain about the way the hearing was handled Tuesday.
Meanwhile, back in Charlotte, the oligarchy is hard at work...
http://charlotte.rhinotimes.com/story.html?id=628
Secretive CMS Task Force Takes A Public Pounding
By BRIAN GOTT - STAFF WRITER
The school deconsolidation movement keeps gaining steam, as another grassroots citizens meeting was held this week to discuss the prospect of breaking the behemoth Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools bureaucracy into smaller, more manageable districts.
But that wasn’t the only topic on the minds of the 75 or so residents, along with a handful of elected officials, who met for a town forum Tuesday night in Mint Hill.
Indeed, the topic of CMS’ newly formed review task force took center stage for part of the evening. And a pair of school board members – Lee Kindberg and Larry Gauvreau – attempted to distance themselves from the task force after Matthews Mayor Lee Myers criticized the group for not including any representation from Matthews or Mint Hill.
“I am an unhappy camper,” Myers told the residents gathered for the Mint Hill forum, which was called by parents to discuss the prospect of deconsolidation of CMS and other education-related issues. “You apparently don’t count for much,” Myers told the crowd. “I guess I’m not important either.”
Myers said he attempted to meet with the co-chairs of the task force citizen group – former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt and banking executive Catherine Bessant – to encourage them to add residents of either Matthews or Mint Hill to the task force.
Myers said Gantt was apparently too busy to meet with him. The result: the group’s leaders asked an Indian Trail resident to join.
“Thirty percent of Mecklenburg County has been completely disregarded in terms of this CMS task force that’s going to work,” Myers said.
The review task force, which is comprised of 16 people drawn largely from the local business community, met for the first time this week, and chose to do so behind closed doors. As a private group it is not subject to open meetings laws that cover elected bodies. Still, the task force has already been criticized for throwing up the same cloak of secrecy that is an all-too-common modus operandi for CMS.
Other speakers at the Mint Hill forum also criticized the new review panel, which sprung from an idea hatched by School Board Chairman Joe White and Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners Chairman Parks Helms. The task force was created in part as a response to discussions that have surfaced all over the county calling for the deconsolidation of CMS, as well as growing concerns about school construction, funding, overcrowding, discipline, and a host of other issues.
Talk of the task force at times dominated Tuesday night’s forum.
Kindberg, whose district includes Mint Hill, said in no uncertain terms: “It (the task force) is not an official task force of the school system.” She also said it was “big business” in Charlotte that put together the group and reiterated that she had nothing to do with it and said the board of education did not vote to put together the group.
Gauvreau accused Kindberg of telling “a fib” by implying the task force does not have the support of the board of education. That started a short jab session between the two.
“Are you affiliated (with the task force)?” Kindberg asked Gauvreau.
“No,” he replied.
“I’m not either,” she said.
During a question and answer session towards the end of the meeting, Kindberg was asked how the task force’s recommendations would be received if it, in fact, was not an agent of the board of education.
“We’d be crazy not to listen to them,” Kindberg said at one point, noting that there was a tremendous amount of business experience represented by the task force.
Gauvreau and Kindberg, the only two school board members that attended Tuesday’s forum, also were on opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to deconsolidation.
Kindberg said supporting deconsolidation would be tantamount to worrying only about self-interests, instead of trying to work to find solutions that would benefit the entire CMS district.
Gauvreau said CMS’ problems, in particular a growing disconnect between central administration and the concerns of students, parents, and teachers, have only grown worse as the district has grown larger. Smaller districts would allow for more accountability, Gauvreau said, and better student performance.
That split view on the pros and cons of deconsolidation was par for the course Tuesday night, when the prospect of splitting up CMS drew a mixed review. Several people that attended the meeting said they did so to learn more about the issue.
Most recently, N.C. Representatives John Rhodes and Jim Gulley have introduced legislation that calls for a referendum vote this November to let the public decide if CMS should be broken into smaller districts. The legislation, by all accounts, faces an uphill battle to gain approval.
Most legislators favor consolidation because they say it boosts costs efficiencies, even though a growing amount of evidence tends to suggest otherwise.
In any event, the deconsolidation movement has come a long way from its rather humble beginnings, when it was originally launched by some students and parents from north Mecklenburg who had become fed up with the district’s overcrowded schools, mounting problems with violence and discipline, and poor test scores.
Over the last several weeks a variety of public forums have been held, most notably in the towns of Huntersville and Matthews, to discuss the idea of deconsolidation.
North Mecklenburg resident Jack Heilpern – along with his son, James – got the deconsolidation ball rolling earlier this year when the younger Heilpern got discouraged about problems at Hopewell High School. At Tuesday night’s meeting, Jack Heilpern said the only way for fundamental change at CMS is a deconsolidation of the district.
“If you don’t take out the top three levels of CMS management, nothing will change,” Heilpern said.
Representatives Rhodes and Gulley were both present at Tuesday’s meeting, and used it as an opportunity to inform the public about their bill and ask for support.
“There are a lot of people against this bill and that’s where you come in,” Rhodes told the crowd. “I need your help.”
At nearly 120,000 students, CMS is the largest district in the state. The bill pitched by Rhodes and Gulley could have CMS split into districts of about 40,000 students.
Matthews Mayor Ted Biggers welcomed the crowd and said, “The town of Mint Hill does not have an official position on this.” But he also said if deconsolidation gives area residents more choices, he could support it. Biggers said since he became mayor in 1989, he’s only gotten a handful of complaints about CMS.
His comments clearly irked one person in the audience, who in the anonymous, question-and-answer session at the end of the meeting – where people got an opportunity to submit questions in writing – accused Biggers of “dancing around deconsolidation.”
“My position is clear,” Biggers said. “I want to do what the people of Mint Hill want to do.”
Several parents at the meeting said they had not formed an opinion on deconsolidation and they were there to find out more information.
“I enjoyed it,” said Mint Hill parent Randi Ferguson. “I came in here leaning against forming smaller districts and now I’m heading the other way.”
Parent Adrianne Sheffield said she still needs more information.
“I still want to know who is going to make the decision as far as where the lines are drawn,” Sheffield said.
Still to others, student assignment boundaries amount to pocketbook issues. Mint Hill resident Kay Ferguson said where you live in Mint Hill has a direct bearing on your property values.
“If you live on the Butler (High School) side, your property values are going up and we’re on the Independence (High School) side,” Ferguson said.
If the Mecklenburg County lawmakers’ bill became law, there would be a November referendum to dissolve CMS and create multiple school systems within Mecklenburg County. If the referendum were approved, the legislation would be immediately enacted and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education would be abolished by July 1, 2006.