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KENANSVILLE — Members of the Duplin County Board of Education made their feelings known about state-required accountability testing at their Oct. 1 meeting.
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s accountability results for the 2023-24 school year were announced Sept. 4. Although Duplin County Schools are no longer designated as a low-performing district, the individual schools had mixed accountability grades, with only one school, Duplin Early College High School, earning a B, while six schools earned Cs, three were graded D, and three got Fs.
After a presentation of the results to the school board, Board Vice Chair Reginald Kenan stated, “We talk about this all the time and it’s very complex and confusing how you grade schools.”
He added that he’s frustrated to see people voice support for public schools, and then vote for political candidates who are clearly anti-public schools. “If we believe we want what’s best for our children, then we must support people who support public schools,” Kenan said.
Kenan explained that he hoped that schools would be measured more by growth than by current standards. “I’m not a teacher but I’ve got enough sense to know a child feels empowered when he or she can show some growth in their schooling. If we continue to elect the same old people in Raleigh who are anti-public education, we will deal with this model forever. It’s not fair to our teachers who work hard. These grades do not determine the work that our educators are putting into our children to make them better.”
Board Chairman Brent Davis agreed. “It’s no secret from anyone who knows me, I detest this testing model,” he said. “It’s just a sad perception of what actually goes on in our school system. If you look at every one of these schools, their successes last year are more in growth than there would be in simple proficiency, but unfortunately, we don’t get that benefit by this model. It’s 80% proficiency and 20% growth, is how it’s calculated.”
He called the current testing model “terribly bad for our students, really bad for our staff.”
“I say all the time, you can’t compare a rural school system like Duplin County, where we’ve got 80-plus percent of our students that are economically disadvantaged, with a school system like Wake County or Mecklenburg where they have tons and tons of resources,” Davis added. “Your median household income is two or three times what it is here. It’s just not a comparable model.”
Board Member Pam Edwards also voiced her displeasure with the current testing system, lamenting that teachers in private schools and charter schools don’t have to undergo the same rigorous certification process as public school teachers, yet they’re all lumped together under the state testing model. “They don’t have to teach the same coursework and they don’t have to take the same tests, but yet, we’re compared to them,” Edwards said. “So you have to say hats off to our educators for what they are doing.”
In other business at the Oct. 1 school board meeting, Melisa Brown, Duplin County director of Senior Services, proposed that Duplin County Schools offer free or discounted admission to athletic events for seniors aged 60 and over.
Brown explained that a statewide Senior Tar Heel Discount Card has been revamped into the Senior Tar Heel Athletic Card, giving seniors discounts to athletic events. “The NC Division of Aging is no longer issuing the cards,” she said. “They have pushed it down to the AAAs, and we are part of the local council of the Area Agency on Aging. There are many seniors that are guardians of their grandchildren, so they want to participate in events and sometimes, the admission is more than they can afford.”
Other area counties offer the cards to seniors, and the cards are good for free or discounted admission to high school athletic events.
“In looking at it, I do feel that it would benefit our senior population and we do have a lot of grandparents that are raising children at home,” Edwards stated. “It’s just recently gone up to $10 admission for our high schools.”
After some discussion over whether to offer a 50% discount or make admission free for seniors, Davis suggested that the board table the item until the next meeting. “Don’t get me wrong, this board’s 100% in favor of helping the seniors,” he said. “I think we just need to decide how much we can do. I think it’s really a three-part question: are we going to do 50%, are we going to do 100% and are we going to allow for out-of-county folks, and I think that’s what we really need to do, is go back to the athletic directors and see how that’s going to impact their budgets.”
