For most of the spring and summer of 2023, at least three members of the Cherokee County Board of Education presented similar plans to consolidate elementary and middle schools at various community, planning and school board meetings. Since none of the plans were greeted with instant approval, members went back to the drawing board, and discussion about consolidating schools ended in the fall.
Until Jan. 18, that is. That’s when, seemingly out of nowhere, school board members approved two controversial rezoning plans:
- Martins Creek and Ranger Elementary/Middle schools will become pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade elementary schools, with Hiwassee Dam Elementary School students moving to Ranger.
- Ranger middle-school students will move to Hiwassee Dam Middle School, while Martins Creek middle schoolers will move to Murphy Middle School.
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School board members elected in 2022 campaigned on being more open and transparent, even saying they would call for a referendum on whether to consolidate high schools. Yet, they pushed for these decisions without notifying students, parents and teachers in advance, much less even holding a public hearing.
The heated emotions that often greet school-related issues has led to some board members being threatened. Folks, we’re supposed to be better than that. I don’t know any of the school board members on a personal level, but I believe each of them cares about our kids and is doing what they think is best.
Was such a public hearing technically necessary? Since no school campuses were being closed, it was not.
However, the much-maligned prior school board and superintendent did, in fact, hold a public hearing when they considered a similar plan in the spring of 2019 with Hiwassee Dam and Ranger. Afterward, they decided to hold off on it since “key players do not believe in the merits of the proposal,” as then-superintendent Jeana Conley put it.
Contrast that with how these rezoning votes were handled:
- While K-8 consolidation plans were talked about at length, these specific elementary-to-middle-school proposals were not mentioned in a public meeting until after filing for Cherokee County’s 2024 elections wrapped up in December. There’s a reason for that.
- The meeting agenda item talking about rezoning was buried under the heading of “Facilities,” which is usually where building repairs are discussed – not moving students from one place to another. That may very well have violated the school system’s own policy.
- The rezonings are set to apply when the 2024-25 school year begins in late summer, not leaving much time to request a total of $276,500 from the Cherokee County Board of Commissioners to pay for retrofitting the facilities, much less actually get the work done by August. Note: Two of the county’s five commissioners have said they won’t approve this amount of spending, already putting the plans in doubt.
The Feb. 15 school board meeting was the first time the public got a chance to express itself on this subject. Yet, because 12 people – who are usually given three minutes each – signed up to speak, the board chair decreased their time allotment to only two minutes each in order to keep the public comment period at 30 minutes or less.
That decision showed little to no respect for the people who spent their Thursday night anxiously standing in a hallway. The board couldn’t go a few minutes over the usual time in order to make sure every waiting person’s voice could be heard?
That decision was another example of what has become common at school board meetings under Superintendent Keevin Woody – a rush to the finish. While no one wants to return to the epic six-hour-plus meetings school board members had in the 2000s, intentionally trying to finish an important meeting within an hour has led to shorter discussions and faster talking, neither of which work well when trying to explain complex issues.
That overall lack of transparency was established quickly after Woody took office. The board’s policies say all media inquiries must run through the superintendent or board chair – but the chair doesn’t respond to inquiries, and the superintendent’s track record for responding has been unreliable. As a result, there have been far fewer stories in the Cherokee Scout this year about what students are doing in the classroom.
It’s also hard not to wonder what school board meetings would be like with an attorney present. In 38 years of reporting, I’ve never witnessed a government board meet without having one on hand to share legal advice, yet Woody thought that wasn’t necessary. Considering how many millions of dollars our county has paid out in lawsuits in recent years, I wouldn’t dare meet without a lawyer.
The simple truth is Cherokee County needs a plan for the entire school system, not another round of Band-Aids that will quickly need replacing. No changes should be approved until the public has a chance to review a full plan for all campuses from pre-kindergarten through senior year.
Before we can do that, officials need to know what kind of school system we really want in Cherokee County and how to best to pay for it. As in this week’s Poll Question:
- Do we want to keep the same number of campuses and grade alignments that we have today and end up paying higher taxes countywide?
- Do we want to keep all campuses, but charge taxpayers more or less based on their school district?
- Do we want to consolidate some school campuses in order to keep taxes lower countywide?
To the point: Do the rezonings have merit? Larger middle schools in particular would allow more options for students in both academics and athletics. Larger elementary schools would cut down on the number of classes with as few as five students, allowing resources to be spent more efficiently. There are solid reasons to support those decisions, just as there are solid reasons to want to keep schools as they are today.
However, when something is approved in a flawed process, it causes people to question everything about it.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. You can reach him by phone, 828-837-5122; email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com; or on X
@daviddBstroh.