School Board Mustn't Dodge Growth Issues

A proposed ordinance, the Schools Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance, would require developers to get school board permission to build before taking their requests to town boards or the Board of Commissioners.

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro Board of Education and the Orange County Board of Commissioners are the only boards considering the ordinance now.

The goal of the proposed ordinance is to alleviate school overcrowding.

I can't argue with the goal.

Under the ordinance, school boards would consider whether the schools serving an area a developer wants to build in have enough space to support the new students that new homes would bring to the schools.

While the goal of the proposed ordinance is a noble one, giving school boards power in determining development is only avoiding the problem of overcrowded schools.

It's not the best solution.

One of the attractive things about living in Orange County is the school systems.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro is arguably the best school district in the state, and Orange County Schools is also a high-quality district.

Halting development to try to stop overcrowding of those school systems is like hoarding two good school systems and not letting new people use them.

People are going to want to move here so their kids can get a good education, and the school district should be able to grow and change with the community.

Running away from the problem by just not letting too many people in is too passive.

School overcrowding is a problem everywhere.

If Orange County's districts deal with it by keeping people out, they're just pushing the problem elsewhere.

In North Carolina "elsewhere" is most likely a school system under much more financial stress than one of our local ones.

The proposed ordinance seems almost like an elitist attempt to save a good school system from experiencing the same problems the rest of North Carolina's schools are experiencing.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools has an overcrowding commission that is considering other solutions as well. The school board presented a list of options Thursday night at its meeting.

As The News & Observer reported Thursday, the options are changing the schools children in certain neighborhoods go to, relocating some kindergarten and exceptional education classes, increasing class size at Scroggs Elementary School (which has a lower student-to-teacher ratio than the other schools in the district) and adding mobile classroom units to overcrowded schools. There also are the options of moving the fifth-grade students at McDougle Elementary School to Seawell Middle School, leasing outside space for classrooms or programs for overcrowded schools and creating incentives at schools with open classroom space.

None of these options are entirely desirable.

No one wants to go to school in a double-wide. And God knows middle school should take up as little of someone's life as possible.

But at least they're options, and at least they're not aimed at keeping people out.

That said, town planning is always a good idea, and it would be valuable for the school boards to act as consultants when developers ask town boards or the commissioners to let them build.

But they shouldn't have official power over it. Giving school boards the power to deny developers' requests to build is giving them power outside their jurisdiction.

Developments do get political, so board members should stick to dealing with school problems and stop running from them.

Erin Mendell can be reached at mendell@email.unc.edu.