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Anyone want to have two (or three or more) school superintendents running around loose in Guilford County? Anyone want the county commissioners to have to deal each year at budget time with multiple school boards? Anyone care to imagine the chaos that would erupt at the meetings to decide new school district boundaries?

Didn't think so.

I hadn't even thought about it, but you are right: the process of splitting the district up would make redistricting or the High Point reassignment plan look like minor skirmishes. I guess I would have guaranteed job security!

Bruce,

Thanks to the HP Lottery Plan and the other many issues, you already have guaranteed job security.

Speaking of raises for SB, isn't time for your yearly review?

I hear the "Washington Post" calling.

Bruce, you know you have job security and it has a name: Redistricting.

Coming to a school system near you. Sometime soon.

We'll probably be buried under a mountain of redistricting meetings, either this summer or in the fall once the district buys up the last of the land it needs for the 2003 bond projects.

So, don't worry. We've got plenty of work to keep busy!

Jennifer,

I think I remember the GCS Superintendent stating at a county commissioner meeting he was not aware of any redistricting in the works.

Do you have information our superintendent is not privy to?

Maybe he just forgot!

I'm not sure what the conversation was between Grier and the commissioners.

But the school board has discussed in the past plans to redistrict to accommodate the new schools included in the 2003 bond. They've put off the discussions though because they haven't bought all of the land yet. They need to know where the schools will go before they can draw any lines.

In particular, the Northern elementary, middle and high schools will force the system to divide up the part of the county now shared by Northwest and Northeast, etc.

However, this won't be along the lines of the 1999 redistricting, which was countywide. But this also will not be a small matter. It will have a domino effect. How large that effect will be remains to be seen. There's a lot of growth in the eastern part of the county and in north High Point. What happens there likely will affect how the lines are drawn.

The eastern growth already forced the district to shift direction with regard to the old McLeansville Middle. Instead of becoming a magnet school, as first proposed, the board decided to make it an elementary to ease some of the growth in that area.

Back to the original topic, deconsolidation. It's true that this concept creates many new challenges and issues, but realistically, dealing with them would be welcome to some people considering how miserable they have become with the current configuration. Just because it is difficult, certainly doesn't mean that it is not worth doing. Probably, the most difficulty would be created by so doing for the county commissioners. They would have to become able to pick apart school budgets,understand them, and know what is wheat and what is chaffe. But, then, they would be really doing that which they should do, so the juice is worth the squeezing here.

For openers, I think that you break the High Point schools away from GCS. They are being treated as second class citizens there now anyway. Let's face it, Greensboro is wagging High Point here. High Point deserves self-determination on their schools. Breaking out the schools and districts here would be easy, as GCS already refers to the "High Point Schools" as though it was a separate entity, so let's make it so.

As far as the rest of the county, it might be a little tougher, but it seems that perhaps dividing the rest of the county into a couple or three districts would be easy. Perhaps, you could go with the eastern part of the county, the central part of the county, and the westerm part of the county. By reducing GCS into smaller segments, you could truly get board members who are friends and neighbors of parents and students. They would be intimate with the needs of those students, and they could better address those needs, as they often vary across the county. If we break it down far enough and reduce the number of schools to a workable number, we might not even need a school superintendent. We could have the board earn their money and supervise the principals directly. We wouldn't need huge central ofifce staffs either, as we could get back to the basics of education. I'm sure that there are many options available that I haven't thought of here, but it does deserve examination, especially if CMS is successful in making progress on this subject. It is certainly doable, as we see neighboring counties that have multiple school districts. If they can do it successfully, why can't Guilford County?

Teddy,

I completey agree with you! Guilford County is too big of a machine for one person to handle. The diversity of the population along with the needs of the individual townships are being ignored. The answer just might well be breaking up the monopoly and finding leaders whose job it is to figure out what is wrong before the presribe a cure all!