Ahead of Thursday’s Board of Education meeting and a vote on the future of Glenwood Elementary School’s World Language pathway, Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Superintendent Rodney Trice shared his recommendation: to dissolve the option and redistrict the students to neighborhood schools.
Trice emailed Glenwood Elementary and Mary Scroggs Elementary School parents and staff on Monday, saying he reached the conclusion after considering the feedback gathered from stakeholders on both campuses and consulting enrollment data. A deeper presentation is expected to be shared with the board members ahead of their vote, but the superintendent said he wanted to alert affected families first to prevent it coming as “a surprise.”
The World Language learning track, which offers students 90 minutes of Mandarin instruction, was part of Glenwood’s transition into a magnet school in 2020. Unlike the Dual Language program — which pre-dated the World Language option and teaches children in Mandarin for 50% of the day — it was designated to transition to Scroggs Elementary instead of Rashkis Elementary School as part of the Glenwood Elementary closure before the 2027-28 school year. During their August 20 meeting, CHCCS Board of Education members raised several questions about how it would function alongside Scroggs’ existing Spanish class for students and delayed a vote on determining its future.
Beyond the elementary school’s 75-year-old building becoming more difficult to maintain, the conversation around and decision to close Glenwood Elementary is rooted in the CHCCS district’s waning enrollment. With those changes, administrators are looking to do a broader redistricting effort to right-size their elementary schools’ capacity and improve efficiency for where students are going.
In his message on Monday, Trice said he and his staff concluded that moving the World Language learning pathway in its current form to Scroggs Elementary would create redistricting challenges.
“Continuing the existing World Language offering as a magnet at Scroggs (or moving the current cohort there and phasing the program out over several years) would reserve seats outside the normal attendance-area process and reduce the Board’s flexibility to establish stable school boundaries,” he wrote. “A phase-out model could also create additional vacancies at Scroggs over time as the existing cohort progresses through elementary school, potentially requiring future student assignment changes simply to refill those seats. Given where we are today, I believe the most responsible recommendation is to preserve as much flexibility as possible as we enter the larger redistricting process.
“I know this recommendation will be disappointing to some members of the Glenwood community,” the superintendent added, “just as other possible recommendations would have created significant concerns within the Scroggs community. There is no option before us that eliminates disruption or fully resolves the competing interests involved.”
Part of Trice’s recommendation to the board, according to his letter, will be to review all of the district’s World Language programming at its elementary schools to better define and offer the model — including the criteria necessary to warrant ‘magnet school’ status.
‘Maybe they weren’t promises’: Glenwood families share continued frustration
Trice also acknowledged the unusual circumstances that could lead to Glenwood Elementary students not finishing out the World Language pathway, like CHCCS often tries to allow. For many Glenwood families, that’s been the fear since the school board vote on August 20 formally moved the Mandarin immersion students to Rashkis Elementary but wavered on sending the World Language children to Scroggs Elementary.
The results and questions about whether the World Language pathway could continue have damaged Glenwood Elementary families’ trust in both the district and the school board. Jennifer Tang, the secretary of the school’s PTA, points to messages sent out by Trice in February and after the closure vote in June pledging the STEAM² element of the school would continue and students could complete their program pathways. While upset, she said, she still believed that CHCCS leaders would follow through on both of those.
“I was buying into that narrative, ‘Only buildings are being closed, and [if] these programs have to be split’ – which, I don’t agree with, but I’m not the one making decisions here – ‘we will find a way to make that work,’” Tang recounted to Chapelboro. “So, I was ready and the PTA was ready, and many of our families were ready [for the change]. That’s why August 20 was such a blow to so many in our community: we’d been given multiple reassurances to why we shouldn’t worry about losing our program or having it dismantled.”
Shawn Handy is the parent of two children attending Glenwood, with a third grader in the World Language track. Their family’s proximity to the campus is initially what drove him and his wife to enroll their daughter more than the Mandarin components and STEAM² class — which incorporates Mandarin into STEAM activities.
“It started out just as a matter of convenience…and then we really fell in love with the community and we took the full plunge,” Handy said, referencing his youngest now being enrolled in the Mandarin immersion pathway. “So, we have kids in both tracks.”
Like many other Glenwood families, Handy said he still feels disappointed about the Board of Education’s selection of their school for closure in the first place – but that they worked to set their children’s expectations and focus on the continuity they thought the district would provide.
“We told our kids they may be losing the building, but all the things that they loved about Glenwood – their programs, their community – would still be there,” he said. “And now we’re hearing something different, and it just feels like the goalposts keep moving.
“That’s why people are frustrated,” Handy added. “They feel like promises were made, and maybe they weren’t promises at all.”
Handy said in the last month, he believes world language families have been left with more questions than answers and is “waiting for some clear direction” before deciding about whether to have his third grader enrolled in the public school system next year. While he isn’t exactly looking forward to the Board of Education vote on whether to dissolve or further change the World Language pathway, he said having an answer of what will happen is important – even if Glenwood families have now “come to expect the worst-case scenario.”
“I just think the process has been excruciating, it’s been painful, and it just continues,” Handy said. “I’m looking forward to having a resolution, and I hope it’s favorable for the world language families. But I also know that right after this vote, they’re going to be looking at the broader redistricting and I think the broader community is going to realize this affects everybody, and not just Glenwood and our families.”
Thursday’s meeting could result in a different outcome than Trice’s recommendation – something the superintendent acknowledged in his Monday message, as board members will bring their own perspectives. Handy said in his mind, the best-case scenario would be a compromise to let the current cohorts of older students in the World Language track finish out their time at Rashkis Elementary alongside the immersion track. Tang agreed, saying she and other PTA members were hoping to collaborate and share more ideas like that with district leaders before Trice reached his conclusion.
“We had been trying to look forward rather than backward on how we could make the most of the learning we’ve had and co-learn with other schools,” said Tang. “But that doesn’t look like it’s on the table. So, I think their two biggest priorities, at this point, would be to make sure the families and the cohorts stay together, and [maintaining] the STEAM² [program.] …We’ve put a lot of work [in] through families, staff and support that we would hate to see go to waste, so we hope there’s a way to maintain that STEAM² curriculum. It is perhaps one of the bigger draws – I would say more than Mandarin – for many of our world language families.”
The open session of the CHCCS Board of Education meeting for Thursday, September 17, begins at 7 p.m. The full agenda and livestream link can be found here.
Featured photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.
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