American Graduate Series

Being on a school board is a little like being the head chef at the local Applebee’s. You don’t get to choose the ingredients and it’s not your recipe, but if someone doesn’t like the Bourbon Street Steak, you’re going to hear about it.

In other words, school boards in North Carolina have relatively little power but plenty of responsibility. And it’s been that way for a long time.

This fall about 13,000 middle school students in the Guilford County Schools district will receive tablets. It’s part of a $30 million Race to the Top grant that Guilford won last year. Administrators and teachers will receive training from a company called Amplify in the coming months. 

State lawmakers in the Senate have approved a bill that would change how leaders of the Wake County school board are elected.

Senate Bill 325 would scrap the current boundaries for board seats. It would also move board elections from odd to even-numbered years, when voters choose their representatives in Congress and the General Assembly.

A change may be coming to how local school boards and boards of county commissioners negotiate over school funding. 

Local county commissioners control the purse strings in all 115 of the state’s school districts. Often, the school boards and county commissioners disagree over the amount of money allocated to schools.

As he unveiled his proposed $20.6 billion dollar budget yesterday, the banner behind Governor Pat McCrory trumpeted the three initiatives he wanted to emphasize. It read: “Economy. Education. Efficiency.” In reality, though, education should have been number one, because it’s by far the largest expenditure and the area where the biggest fights are likely.

Educators don’t often get a chance to celebrate publicly, so it was understandable when State Superintendent June Atkinson stood up at a news conference last fall and bragged a little about North Carolina’s 80 percent high school graduation rate.

“This is excellent news for our state and one more step toward ensuring that all of our students graduate from high school career, college, and citizenship ready,” said Atkinson.

Seventy new charter schools have applied to become part of North Carolina’s growing population of alternative public schools. For the longest time, the number of charter schools in the state was capped at 100, but lawmakers changed that back in 2011.

Deborah Hicks  grew up in an Appalachian paper mill town she hoped to escape. Her education opened doors for her to leave and travel to other parts of a country, but she returned time and again to Appalachia as a teacher. Deborah has dedicated her life to educating those that need her most - focusing on young girls in poor neighborhoods. She is the founder and director of PAGE, Partnership for Appalachian Girls' Education, in Madison County.

Our series of stories from The Monti concludes today with Sarah Carucci. She now works as a graduation coach at Communities in Schools -- but she got her start in education as a teacher. Her story was recorded in front of an  audience at Motorco in Durham as a part of WUNC's American Graduate collaboration with The Monti.

All this week we're featuring stories recorded in front of a live audience about critical moments at school. It's part of our on-going American Graduate project, a public media initiative looking at the drop out crisis and other issues in education. Everybody has a story about a turning point at school -- sometimes it's about a big test or academic triumph -- other times it's about something a little more intimate, like falling in love for the first time. That's the subject of this story from Jonas Monast. It was recorded in front of a live audience at The Monti.