Beaufort County is losing students and does not have a plan to cope | Eastern North Carolina Now

It is way past time for political leaders to accept the obvious:  Our public schools are not doing the job that is needed.  It has been that way for several years now and shows no signs of turning around.  With more alternatives available to more parents than sending their children to the K-12 Public School System, the condition is not likely to improve as more and more parents abandon the public school system.

Beaufort County is a good example of the slow dismantling of the public school system.  For a decade there has been a constant decline of K-12 enrollment in the BCS system and particularly in the eastern part of the county, excluding Bath, and especially in the Washington Attendance Area.  In fact, Bath and Chocowinity have the only sustainable enrollment trends.

The current blind march to exacerbate this decline in Washington will be fueled by the monstrously bad decision to demolish Eastern Elementary and replace it with a $50 million mega primary school that will perpetuate the cross-town busing order year ago as a part of the dismantling of the segregated system.  When you study where the residential growth in Beaufort County has come and where is it likely to be in the future what is obvious is that Washington will suffer a continuing loss of students.  Chocowinity and Bath will grow and the rest of the county will be stuck like a stick in the mud.  And our current School Board, led by a terribly weak Superintendent, apparently does not even sense what the problem is and how bad it will continue to be and worse still, how to turn the situation around.  Unless they wake up, there is no doubt that the non-public school system will be the system of choice going forward.  A cursory review of enrollment trends in alternatives to the public school system tell the story of the future on public schools in Beaufort County.  

This dismal picture cannot be denied by any sound review of the growth trends.  The eastern parts of the county will continue to suffer low enrollment trends.  Washington will fight white flight and Bath and Chocowinity will service the growth areas.  What this picture does not show clearly now is what could be.  The greatest potential for the Beaufort County Schools is in the US 264 corridors (existing and proposed new Interstate coming into the county from Pitt County.)  Smart developers will see this and build within that corridor to attract excess growth from Pitt County, specifically fed by the Medical Complex.  But a new elementary school is essential for that projected growth.  Many parents will shy away from building/buying where their children are going to be bused miles across town twice a day.  The alternative will be the alternative education system of private schools and home schools for the younger children.  The current superintendent and school board are wearing blinders to the reality for the next twenty-thirty years in Beaufort County.

That criticism is not meant as an indictment of the current leadership.  It is not their fault.  This pattern in Beaufort County is repeated all across the state.  

The John Locke Foundation recently released a study that updates earlier studies showing the trends in the state’s school systems.  It is much the same story wherever you look.  Traditional public schools are declining and the alternative schools/systems are growing.  School systems that do not develop a strategy to deal with the shifts will decline more and those that develop effective ways to counter the trends will grow.  There will be little in between.  It is a story for another day, but the reason this is true is simple economics.  MR ≠ MC:  Marginal revenue does not equal marginal costs.  Declining enrollment causes a larger decline in revenue than costs are reduced by that decline.  The result is inevitable:  Reduced quality and a greater inability to compete attracting/retaining students, and the $$$ they generate.

Beaufort County stands at a crossroads.  It can grow or wither like crops in a dry field.  And the school system will cause one or the other to be the story of the future.