031505 Work Session attachment 1

Browse Search

Introduction Some time ago, when the Orange County Commissioners were studying the issues surrounding the question of merger of the Orange and Chapel Hill - Carrboro school systems, they asked the authors of this report if we could help them to understand and think about the educational issues related to this topic. Lacking the expertise and time to advise the commissioners on the subject of merger, per se, we agreed to study a related question; What are the educational resources and opportunities available to the children of each district? We were granted $25,000 to study this question in July 2004. We initiated our work in the summer, meeting with the Educational Excellence Work Group comprised of the superintendents of the two school districts, the County Manager and Assistant County Manager, representatives of the Orange County Commissioners, and a representative of the Public School Forum, to shape the scope of work, and develop the research questions. Having reviewed the data gathered by both school districts for the Commissioners' consideration, we recognized that in order to gauge how the resources listed in that data affected the educational experiences of the county's K -12 students, we needed to interview the principals of all the county schools. We suspected then, and our study confirmed our intuition, that the differences among schools within each of the districts would be almost as dramatic as differences revealed in the comparison of the aggregated data of the two districts. We created an interview protocol that was approved by the two school superintendents and then visited every school in the county at least twice, once to introduce the study and then to conduct the interview. Aided by the staff of EvAP (Evaluation, Assessment and Policy Connections, a center for evaluation research at the UNC- Chapel Hill School of Education), we drew data from the interview protocols. We then reviewed NC State Report Card Data for 2002 -2003, and when the 2003 -2004 data was released by the state in November, we added that data to our considerations as well. We met with the Educational Excellence Work Group again in November 2004 to indicate the general direction of our findings and to hear their questions so that our work might directly address important issues. Everyone on our research team, Professors Madeleine Grumet, George Noblit and Rita O'Sullivan, doctoral students Amy Anderson and Kim Pyne and consultant Martha Hudson has been impressed with the intense effort, expertise, and enthusiasm of the school personnel with whom we spoke. We also appreciate the kind and supportive responses of the people who work in the district offices who worked to provide us with the data that we requested. Let us acknowledge the economic conditions that frame the educational situations that we are studying. The Chapel Hill Carrboro City Schools (CHCC5) rank 5th (of 117 districts) in the state for per pupil expenditures and serve about 10,500 students; the Orange County Schools (OCS) rank 17th and serve about 6,500 students. Per pupil expenditures are comprised of federal, state and local monies. While OCS received slightly more money than CHCCS from the state in 2003 -2004 ($4,573 compared with $4,447.91), CHCCS clearly outpaced OCS in local per pupil funds ($4,173.84 compared with $2,915.42 for OCS); this due to a special CHCCS school tax levied on residents of Chapel Hill and CHCCS/OCS Final Report 6