NEW HANOVER COUNTY — As the New Hanover County Board of Education narrows in on projects for a bond and digests its recent state report card, which noted a rise in the district’s low-performing schools, several board members have raised the possibility of a small-scale redistricting. Where they differ is what the new boundaries should be based on.
READ MORE: 2025 report card: Pender cuts low-performing schools in half, NHC, Brunswick see increases
Redistricting is the process of determining where a student goes to school based on where they live. Board chair Melissa Mason indicated she’d be interested “micro-distriting,” or rather moving the boundaries slightly or only focusing on one area of the county.
“We know that there are certain parts that are absolutely growing more than the others,” she said in a recent interview with Port City Daily. “We don’t want to cause too dramatic a shift for all of our students. So if it’s a small pocket of different sections of Wilmington, I think that that’s something that we should, at the very least, consider doing now.”
While Mason spoke to the merits of redistricting to reduce overcrowding, the board’s two Democratic members told PCD now, amid conversations on new schools and easing overcapacity, is the ideal time to redistrict with the goal of reducing concentrated poverty brought on by the district’s neighborhood schools model, adopted in 2010. Both claimed this could also be done with micro-techniques.
“It’s possible to move our catchment areas,” Tim Merrick said. “It will be troubling. There will be, there will be kids who have to move schools, and that’s not necessarily in their best interest, but it’s in the best interest of all the kids going forward.”
Though Superintendent Chris Barnes has mentioned redistricting as a way to reduce overhead during NHCS budget conversations, the idea has not been seriously considered by this school board. However, it was brought up by board member David Perry at the Sept. 9 board meeting.
With the goal of putting a bond up for voter approval on the 2026 ballot, the district’s finance committee has recommended five projects for priority — Riverlights Elementary School, New Hanover High School renovations, the replacement of Pine Valley Elementary, a new building at Trask Middle School and a Porters Neck Elementary addition.
The project list wasn’t approved, however, and is scheduled for discussion at a special meeting on Sept. 18. Multiple board members raised issues with not understanding how the projects were picked and if they agreed with the prioritization.
“I went to Blair [Elementary School] and it’s beautiful, brand new and under capacity by about 200 students,” he said. “Now we’re talking about making Porters Neck Elementary, adding an addition there, where if we just redistricted we could probably be using the underutilized space at Blair…we could just redistrict and save the $5 million.”
Board member Pat Bradford spoke with Port City Daily via text about addressing the district’s overhead and her thoughts on redistricting. She said it would be expedient to maximize the district’s resources; consolidation of schools is a “complex challenge” that the board is “not going to solve this school year.”
“While it is wonderful to pivot in a crisis, my goal is always to be proactive rather than reactive,” she wrote.
Port City Daily reached out to Perry for further comment, but he did not respond by press. Neither did board member Pete Wildeboer, though he indicated redistricting wasn’t the answer, pointing to a 2023 study on the district’s capacity.
The study, put together by Cropper/McKibben, showed several NHCS were overcapacity, though New Hanover High, Blair Elementary, Castle Hayne Elementary, Rachel Freeman School of Engineering and Snipes Academy of Arts and Design had more room. The study noted redistricting alone would not solve the disparity in spaces, though, and recommended several options, including:
- Construct a 525-student elementary school near Mary C. Williams Elementary School in Silver Lake and pair the schools, with Williams serving pre-K to second grade and the new school serving grades three through five
- Construct a new middle school on the SEA-Tech campus in Castle Hayne with a 1,000-student capacity.
- Relocate Laney High to the Trask Middle School campus, increasing Laney’s total capacity to 2,502 seats
- Rebuild Pine Valley Elementary for a 525-student capacity
- Expand Porters Neck, Masonboro and Aldermen elementaries
Despite this study, board member Josie Barnhart requested the board review the full list of bond projects for consideration — 16 individual school projects more than $570 million — and hear more information on current capacity and building overhead.
“Some of these projects, that very few were discussed, as far as the renovations and additions could potentially have an opportunity to up capacity where we could provide a more centered approach with resources, consistent resources, for students and staff, which would yield a better, potential, educational experience,” Barnhart said. “These are hard conversations, and some of them are more fiscally responsible to look at.”
In conversation with Port City Daily, Barnhart explained she attributes some of New Hanover County Schools’ slight decline in enrollment in recent years to the high cost of living in the county. Because of this, she said she wanted to be conscious of requesting more funding, and constructing new buildings, due to the ultimate impact on the taxpayer.
“Asking for more money is going to make more people leave our county,” she said. “And I don’t want to see our numbers decline more, because as numbers decline, we have less funding to provide for education.”
She said she would like to ensure the district was maximizing its current footprint, noting consolidating overhead — though she was adamant against sacrificing staff in the process — could also improve student outcomes.
Board member Tim Merrick described the discussion on overhead and capacity “political distraction and deflection” from a needed conversation around redistricting.
“We do need to look at where we have capacity, but when we look at filling those capacities, we need to look at it from the lens of, how do we produce more socioeconomic and racial diversity in that school,” Merrick said.
The board member pointed to the district’s state accountability results as proof a change was needed. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction issues performance grades for each school every year based 80% on test scores and 20% on measured growth, with schools earning a D or F without exceeding growth expectations designated as “low performing.” This year, New Hanover County Schools’ total low performing schools shot up from six to 10 to include:
- Rachel Freeman (F)
- College Park Elementary (D)
- Alderman Elementary (D)
- Forest Hills Global Elementary (D)
- Blair Elementary (D)
- Career Readiness Academy at Mosely (D)
- Sunset Park Elementary (D)
- Snipes Academy (D)
- Williston Middle (F)
- Wrightsboro Elementary (D)
In conversation with Port City Daily on Sept. 5, Superintendent Barnes attributed the rise in low-performing scores to multiple causes, including the state’s reworking of science tests, but most notably, the district having to cut or rehome hundreds of staff members before the 2024-2025 going into the 2024-2025 school year.
Part of the list are the schools with the highest concentrations of minority children and students that qualify for free or reduced lunch. Since 2010, NHCS has followed a neighborhood schools model, intended to keep students learning in the community they live in; in reality, this has concentrated wealth and poverty into certain pockets of the county based on Wilmington’s past with segregated neighborhoods.
The change followed a nationwide shift away from desegregation techniques, including busing, after the Supreme Court ruled in 1991 school districts could be released from desegregation mandates and again in 2007 that schools could not use race as admission criteria. Detractors of the neighborhood schools model warned NHCS of the detriments of adopting the model in the 2010 — by then, reporting was available showing how the abandonment of desegregation efforts was leading to higher segregation — but it was voted in anyway.
Since then, middle and elementary schools underwent a redistricting in 2021 after the addition of Porters Neck Elementary and increased capacity at other schools, though socioeconomic factors were not considered for the new boundaries.
Redistricting came up again during discussion with the district’s Turnaround Task Force, which has since branched off from NHCS as the Elevate Every Child group. Created to form strategies to improve the district’s low-performing schools, the task force came up with three options, as reported by WHQR:
- Continue with the current neighborhood school model, in which about 25% of the district’s 45 schools lag behind their counterparts
- Redistrict the schools so that poverty is not concentrated in particular schools
- Put millions of extra dollars into those schools where poverty is concentrated
The task force’s leader, Scott Whisnant, said the task force’s choice was the third because it couldn’t morally approve of the first or politically support the second, though he noted redistricting would be the quickest route to improvement.
Superintendent Barnes said something similar in conversation with Port City Daily.
“I think at this point, it’s more important to look for ways that we can improve all of our schools now, rather than how do we redistrict ourselves out of a problem, because that doesn’t really solve the problem right now,” he said.
Also citing the political volatility of redistricting, Merrick made clear he was not advocating for a complete overhaul of the system.
“I don’t think the community has the will for it,” he said, noting he has to be accountable to the community’s desire as an elected official.
Instead, Merrick said instrumental changes could be made through small tweaks.
“This is an oversimplification, but say you had a chessboard, and every square on the chessboard was a different school district, a different school, the catchment areas,” he said. “If you just moved everything one half a square over, what you see is you still have neighborhood schools, but you have a mixture of neighborhoods, rather than a singular type of neighborhood.”
Barnhart said her mind wasn’t made up on redistricting, either based on capacity or socioeconomic factors. The board member did have an idea for improving low-performing schools, and it falls within the Turnaround Task Force’s funding recommendation.
Currently, Forest Hills Global Elementary and Rachel Freeman Elementary, are moving into the third year of a grant that gives incentive pay to different levels of staff. Pointing out Forest Hills has improved its state performance score from an F to C in recent years, Barnhart said she would like to see that expanded to all schools that are continually designated low-performing by the state.
“If you have a heavier lift of like, ‘I have a lot of underperforming kids, and I got to get them to grade level, and then above grade level,’ it’s a harder job to do,” Barnhart said. “So how can we incentivize people who are really effective at closing the gap?”
Though Barnhart is proposing paying more to work in schools with higher concentrations of poverty, proponents for redistricting also say spreading out those students across a larger range of schools can also ease the burden on teachers.
Research shows higher-poverty schools experience higher rates of turnover, which then contributes to a more unstable, less tight-knit school culture.
Though more funding versus redistricting has long been a debate in the education realm, there is research showing even with more funding. A 2010 report from The Century Foundation studied students that live in public housing as they were randomly assigned to schools. The study found students assigned to low-poverty elementary schools significantly outperformed their public housing peers who attended moderate-poverty schools in both math and reading. This was the case despite the high-poverty schools receiving around $2,000 more per pupil.
Board member Judy Justice, who has long been a proponent of redistricting based on socioeconomic factors, claimed the district won’t see long-term improvement without redistricting. She also noted the school district is operating on a tight budget, and thus, NHCS would have a hard time directing more funding to low-performing schools.
Justice also claimed the district could bring about change with “targeted redistricting” and noted the district could avoid long bus rides for students, a main concern for districts that move away from a neighborhood schools model.
“We are the second smallest geographically in the state; there is no kid that you can put on a bus that — if we did it right, which we could have done 20 years ago — should be on a bus more than 30 minutes,” Justice said.
Though she wasn’t pushing for it like her fellow board members, Mason didn’t shut down factoring socioeconomic components into redistricting when asked by PCD.
“I think that if we can help our kids — any of them, all of them — and really give all of them better opportunities, I think that we’re winning,” Mason said. “And so if that means that we are moving kids from one school to another to provide that opportunity, I think that our main goal as a district should always be to provide the best education that we possibly can.”
All board members indicated they hoped clarity, at least over the bond projects and district’s current capacity, would come from Thursday’s work session. Justice and Merrick said a talk about socioeconomic redistricting would be an added bonus, but said they didn’t expect the idea to gain traction.
“You gotta be brave, and you’ve got to do it,” Justice said. “And I know for a fact that every time I’ve ever brought it up, the other board members have heart attacks because it’s such a hot potato.”
Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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