Asheville – Buncombe County wants citizens to show up and tell them what they think about a merger of city and county schools. The county is hosting nine open-house-style community meetings and an online forum. Spanish interpretation will be provided.
In September 2023, the North Carolina General Assembly mandated the Asheville City and Buncombe County school systems (ACS and BCS) to conduct a joint study on the feasibility of consolidating. It wasn’t an inordinate request, as most counties in the state only have one school system. What’s more, pushes and studies have been recommending consolidation for over half a century.
House Bill 5 was a smorgasborg of local legislation requests with Section 15(e) reading, “The Buncombe County Board of Education and the Asheville City Board of Education shall jointly study the feasibility of the merger of the Buncombe County School Administrative Unit and the City of Asheville School Administrative Unit, including the potential economic and educational impact of merging the school units and any other relevant information. The Buncombe County Board of Education and the Asheville City Board of Education shall report findings and recommendations to the standing committees of the General Assembly hearing elections matters no later than February 15, 2025.”
The NCGA appointed Buncombe County as project lead, and they, in turn, entered into a $301,543 contract with Prismatic Services. Based in Charlotte, Prismatic is a woman-owned consultancy specializing in analysis for K–12 institutions. Hot topics include equity and inclusion, food and nutrition, and safety and security. The organization was selected from seven consultancies submitting proposals. Bids ranged from $57,000 to $1.5 million.
Most public comment that has been published on the matter aligns with the opinions of Lisa Baldwin. While serving on the BCS board, Baldwin frequently received accolades from the John Locke Foundation for standing up for her minority positions.
Baldwin told the Tribune, “Consolidating the Asheville City and Buncombe County school systems is an idea that is long overdue. Duplication of administrative services eats up valuable taxpayer dollars that could be focused on the classroom. Most of the state’s city/county school districts consolidated services long ago.” She added, “With only 4,000 or so students, Asheville City Schools is wasting valuable taxpayer dollars by duplicating administrative services that the county is also providing.”
When Baldwin was serving, the John Locke Foundation was heavily criticizing school boards across the state for, after whining for more school funding in the name of children, using those added funds to pay excess administrators exorbitant salaries. In Asheville, the problem was not that simple.
Allen Johnson, Pam Baldwin, Denise Patterson, Gene Freeman, Jim Causby, Rick Cruz, and Maggie Fehrman. Those are the names of people appointed to serve as superintendent of ACS since 2013—if Bobbie Short’s three stints as interim superintendent are added. Some were bought out, others resigned.
Whether or not allegations of parental intimidation motivating the swift churn were accurate, it seems the school system could benefit from the governor exercising emergency takeover powers, at least until an investigation gets to the root of the instability. Instead, Roy Cooper declared an emergency in May 2023 “to put a moratorium on destructive private school vouchers until North Carolina’s public schools are fully funded.”
In addition to other overhead, the two school systems could realize multiple economies of scale by merging. Lisa Baldwin pointed out that BCS already handles bus service for ACS.
In budget sessions since Interim County Manager George Wood recommended increasing school allocations formulaically to tie them down to inflation, the CPI, or the county’s budget as a whole, commissioners have been told that their pattern of funding public schools is unsustainable. Unfortunately, it was Wood’s formula that was deemed unsustainable. From 2019 to 2024, education spending by the county has increased from $77 million to $113 million.
This would be wonderful if there were a correlation between education spending and education. Unfortunately, standardized test scores from 2009–2013 ranked ACS’s achievement gap the fifth largest in the nation. In 2021–2022, ACS’s achievement gap ranked worst in the state, while its per-pupil spending was the eighth highest. Time and again, county commissioner and former ACS board member Al Whitesides complained about throwing money at a serious problem and never fixing anything.
A lot of the opposition to consolidation comes from the schools. It has been alleged that in a larger system, the children falling through the cracks would most likely be from the BIPOC community.