Cherokee County Schools greets the 2024-25 school year with a great deal of turmoil:
- Children from Hiwassee Dam, Martins Creek and Ranger are being shuffled to different schools, with longer bus rides.
- The school district’s Central Office headquarters is setting up shop in Marble after being evicted from its old location at 911 Andrews Road.
- Administrators are contending with a $1.2 million loss in annual revenue commissioners shifted to the Cherokee County government’s general fund.
- School board members took six months to find a date to meet with county commissioners that commissioners have sought since January.
- And the whole show is presided over by a school board whose chair was released from her job with the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office under somewhat mysterious circumstances.
Monday, Aug. 26, is the first day of school for Cherokee County Schools.
It is important to note that none of these issues has a thing to do with Cherokee County Schools staff and faculty, who are getting ready for the coming school year despite these unusual circumstances. They all stem from Central Office and the school board.
Moving students around
The school board closed middle schools in Martins Creek and Ranger, and the elementary school in Hiwassee Dam, following a board decision in January. The change creates pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade elementary schools in Martins Creek and Ranger.
Displaced Ranger middle-schoolers will attend Hiwassee Dam Middle School, while Martins Creek middle-schoolers will attend Murphy Middle School. Meanwhile, Hiwassee Dam Elementary School students will be moving to Ranger Elementary.
The school district posted a notice on its Facebook page explaining the next steps for affected families in Hiwassee Dam and Ranger – but not in Martins Creek, where middle-schoolers have been moved to Murphy. Tours were offered for families to become familiar with the different schools.
While getting facilities ready to accommodate changed grade levels at four schools – Hiwassee Dam Middle, Martins Creek Elementary, Murphy Middle and Ranger Elementary – the school district had until Friday to vacate the former Central Office.
Moving Central Office
The Cherokee County Board of Commissioners voted to evict the school district from 911 Andrews Road to make room for emergency communications and services. The county offered its portion of the old National Guard Armory on U.S. 19/74 (shared with the Town of Murphy), but school leaders declined the offer and chose the former Oaks Academy/Marble Elementary School, a surplus property they planned to sell.
Work has been in progress at the Marble campus. A U.S. flag was hoisted outside the school, but the sign out front still reads “The Oaks Academy,” which moved to the Schools of Innovation & Technology in Peachtree two years ago. The school district is still tallying the overall costs.
Meanwhile, the school district is also coming to terms with the loss of an estimated $1.2 million in annual proceeds from a quarter-cent Article 46 sales tax. That decision left many Cherokee County taxpayers angry, saying the sales tax was approved by voters who fully expected the money to always go toward schools.
However, wording in the ballot measure gave commissioners the option to use the money as they wished. In May, they took the money back, using it to help balance their own budget.
County schools leaders have not discussed any funding nor infrastructure changes during monthly school board meetings.
It took them months to come up with a date to meet with commissioners, who had been seeking a joint meeting since the school board reconfigured campuses in January with no public input. Finally, on Monday, county commissioners agreed to a proposed date – 6 p.m. Monday, Sept. 16, location to be determined. They expect a crowd.
Chair out with sheriff
Then there is Shannon Raper, chair of the Cherokee County Board of Education. Raper was elected in 2022 and promptly became chair. She was re-elected chair by board members for 2024.
In her day job, Raper was a senior administrative specialist at the sheriff’s office who started in 2016 making an annual salary of $25,000. She was let go on July 2 from a job that by then paid $37,905.
State law prevents public disclosure of any other information from a public employee’s personnel file. Social media posts by local Republican activist Margaret Ackiss have alleged that Raper was released because she was against high school consolidation – a controversy that helped get her and others elected to the school board in 2022.
Sheriff Dustin Smith was limited about what he could say surrounding the circumstances of Raper’s departure, other than to say it “absolutely had nothing to do with consolidation,” adding that he has never discussed his personal stand on the controversial topic with anyone.
Raper has been contacted via email and phone with an inquiry about the reasons behind her departure from the sheriff’s office and has not responded.