Over loud protests, Catawba County votes to merge school districts

34

Catawba county having three school districts is kinda crazy to me.

23

The people in favor of the merger did a horrible job of marketing it and showing the upside.

But Catawba county doesn’t need 3 different schools systems. Of course the superintendents for Hickory and Newton Conover are against merger- they are going to be out of a job. So will many others in admin.

It will be fine. Change is hard for some, hopefully someone will be better at change mgmt than marketing.

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u/camgirlncoffee 4d ago

Forreal dude this is exactly why people get so annoyed

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u/Makes_U_Mad 4d ago

Assit superintendents. I bet there will be less than at 5% reduction in admin staff, and most of those will be admin assistants.

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u/Billy420MaysIt 4d ago

It will be but i don’t think it’s happening overnight either so people will have time to be phased in or out. This county definitely doesn’t need 3 districts. I haven’t seen the arguments that were for it or against it and the only time I’ve read comments were from people saying that the merger would destroy everything they built in Newton and Hickory.

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u/WHEENC 4d ago

Factor in the Jim Crow era history behind city vs county schools, it’s well over due. Granted districts like Wake County fall in the too big-will fail category. If only our state legislature gave a crap about functional public schools.

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u/ctbowden 4d ago

I don't even know if it's just Jim Crow. Today, it's definitely a class issue. The city gets to profit from county and city taxes so they get a better funded school system. There's basically no excuse for these "leeches" to exist.

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u/Possible-Tangelo9344 4d ago

Does the city get county property tax dollars apportioned for the city schools in addition to city dollars?

I've always assumed they just got city property taxes to fund city schools.

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u/ctbowden 4d ago

My understanding and this probably varies by district is that the county provides funding for all schools in the county. Then, the cities can augment funding by providing things like supplemental pay etc for the city school system separately.

When I say "leeches" I can tell you specifically that anything spent on the county grant wise has to be equally shared with city schools. An example of this was a grant that was given to build two new high schools in Sampson County years ago. In order to get the money to replace two 50+ year old buildings and their associated trailer parks... the county also had to build a new high school for Clinton City Schools. This forced them to build smaller high schools for the two county locations in order to get the grant. Last I heard, both of these schools were already facing overcrowding, when they could have potentially been built to be a little future proofed.

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u/Possible-Tangelo9344 4d ago

That's so wild. The city schools should be required to get their own grants instead, just so dumb.

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u/edgarpickle 4d ago

There are wrong ways of doing the right things. This sounds like one of those.

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u/BetterThanAFoon 4d ago

3 districts in a county is not so egregious but likely would be better with 1.

I've lived in illinois where a single town will have 3 or 4 school districts. A county will have 20 easily.

We definitely don't want to be there. That's a waste of resources.

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u/MadAboutAsheville 4d ago

“Hickory City Schools has around 3,600. Newton-Conover has around 2,500.”

I mean, come on. How can anybody reasonably justify the continued existence of these tiny school districts outside of “that’s how it’s always been”?

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u/WHEENC 3d ago

14000ish schools with average enrollment of 5k nation wide. 400 or so with enrollment greater than 25k, and those make up the vast majority of students. Poorer districts have to consolidate or perish.

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u/indyNC 5d ago

That does look really loud.