Honoring families’ needs

When the Montford North Star Academy opens at the former Randolph School campus in August, Shannon Baggett will serve as principal. The city school system is growing, she notes, and despite the new openings, it will probably be near full capacity by next year, so another middle school will be needed. With a magnet school theme of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math), North Star intends to recruit 100 sixth-grade students for the 2017-18 academic year. After a month and a half of recruiting within the district, the school has 72 students ready to enroll, and it can now start looking outside the district to fill the remaining slots. Baggett says meeting the required demographic quotas hasn’t been a problem, and no families have been turned away.

The city system is also launching Asheville Primary, a new Montessori-style school for kindergarten through third grade, and while interest has been high, there’s still space available, says Director Dawn Meskil. “The priority enrollment period for in-district applications just ended, and we’re now accepting applications for both in-district and out-of-district families.”

Many families, notes Baggett, “leave our district during the middle school years and then come back to the high schools. So I’m hoping that those families that live in our district who may have been thinking about a charter school may want to choose us.”

Like the charters, the newest city schools will be small, with an estimated 30 students per grade at Asheville Primary and 100 per grade for sixth through eighth grades. And as Meskil points out, “At the elementary level, we’ve offered magnet, choice-based options for many years. We leverage student interests to gear the educational programming and services at each school to children in meaningful ways. … In addition, at the high school level, Asheville City Schools has successfully offered the School of Inquiry and Life Sciences for over 10 years.” The district, she continues, “is growing faster than predicted, so the addition of new schools is simply an expansion of our existing model.”

Melissa Hedt, the city schools’ K-12 teaching and learning coordinator, stresses that the system is trying to honor parents’ desires, so they don’t have to choose between staying in the district and sending their kid to a small school. “When kids stay with us all the way through, we really can serve them better than when they’re here, leave and come back,” she says. The city schools, she points out, had been losing 10 to 15 percent of students transitioning from elementary to middle school, but that seems to be changing.

“In the fifth grade right now, we have 338 students, and we’re seeing much fewer of those select out-of-district options than in the past. I think between a brand-new, multimillion-dollar middle school that gives every student their laptop, and now we have the smaller magnet middle school, fewer families are having to go elsewhere to find the option that meets their child’s needs.”