Monday is the first day of school for Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools students and staff in the traditional calendar. While many are excited to get back, today holds more bittersweet feelings for Glenwood Elementary School, as it’s the last time they will open a school year in their building. It also is the last year both components of its Mandarin magnet program – dual language immersion and world language learning tracks – will be together, following the school board’s decision last week to split them up and move the dual language students to Rashkis Elementary.
When Alejandra Martinez Berdeja and her husband moved to Chapel Hill last year, they chose Glenwood Elementary School and its world language learning track for their kindergartner. He is already bilingual in English and Spanish, and Berdeja said they believed exposing him to Mandarin would help him learn about a vastly different language and culture than his own.
After the CHCCS Board of Education voted in June to close Glenwood and move students elsewhere, they sat their son down at the dining room table and told him the news.
“My kid started crying,” Berdeja told Chapelboro. “And I said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to try and follow our friends.’ But what was awful too was, I couldn’t say more beyond that, because the process has been so bad that there’s always been a lot of uncertainty around what would happen next.”
Ben Dawson also has to choke back tears when thinking about the school’s closure. Like Berdeja, he and his wife, Vivian, felt lucky their children got into Glenwood by its lottery system. His two children – third-grader Nora and kindergartner Taplin – are Chinese American, and Dawson said they are enrolled in the dual language immersion track so they can build a stronger connection to the Asian part of their identity.
Nora’s time at Glenwood has been “fantastic,” he said, in part because of how the dual language and world language students overlap and interact in the building. Throughout the summer, Dawson has advocated for keeping the two learning pathways together. When the board voted on Thursday to send his children’s pathway to Rashkis next year – and left the world language students waiting until September to hear an official plan for their futures – he felt like the decision left few silver linings for their community.
“We feel like it’s a loss to be splitting them up [from being] all together,” Dawson said. “No matter which way it comes down: not accredited [as a magnet program], not Mandarin, gone altogether, a lesser form than it currently is. To me, I view all of that as a loss, and all of that as a failure.”
Facing waning enrollment and the need to stabilize its finances, CHCCS officials are trying to push the district into a manageable and efficient size. The strategy of closing an elementary school to achieve that was always going to lead to difficult decisions and conversations. But while CHCCS district leaders and the board tried to involve families in listening sessions, the results of this summer have Glenwood families feeling hurt and like the mechanisms for input were more performative than truly collaborative.
Many described feeling “powerless” both in the lead-up to the June vote to close Glenwood’s campus and in the subsequent months as the district presented the options for what comes next. Some point to the process and timeline presented by the district – which aims to redistrict and right-size its elementary school capacity before next academic year – saying it limited how much families and educators’ thoughts could be incorporated into plans. Others blame the school board, saying they believe more information and education of its members was necessary before either vote.
Glenwood Elementary School is the oldest active school building in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools’ portfolio at 75 years old. That was one aspect of why it was selected by closure by the Board of Education. But the conversations of what happens next for the Glenwood students and staff has further hurt its community. (Photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Rachel Rossi is the president of the Glenwood PTA and the parent of two children in the world language track. One of those students will be headed to middle school next year, but she said the muddled discussion and lack of a decision from the school board leaves her skeptical of what her third grader might face. While she recognizes the district’s enrollment issues – calling it a “crisis” – she is also quick to point out how the conversation has shifted from Glenwood’s closure being about CHCCS’ enrollment and the school’s old building. The board members’ grappling with the future of the Mandarin world language option is indicative of the lack of understanding district decision-makers had around the Glenwood community – and Rossi said it reflects the lack of vision brought into the closure process.
“The district hasn’t had to close a school since they closed the Lincoln Center,” she said, referring to the high school that closed from desegregation in the 1960s. “And I think this [closure] is showing that they’re being forced to do this – and they’re not ready to do it, in a lot of ways, because they haven’t really thought out these processes.”
According to several parents, an inflection point in the discussions with CHCCS leaders came during a June 30 meeting with Glenwood families. Parents and educators believed more time would be spent over the summer sharing ideas and details of their operations with the district to come up with relocation options that were “mutually beneficial to everybody,” said Rossi. They then felt blindsided when the district revealed a pair of options for relocation would be presented to the school board in July: either dividing the program’s learning tracks across different campuses, or effectively displacing students at one of the neighborhood schools by moving Glenwood’s entire student body.
“We don’t want an option that’s impossible for the board to choose,” said Rossi. “And at that July 16 meeting, we really felt like the Option 1 that told [them] we had to completely push out Rashkis was exactly that. It wasn’t acceptable to us. We would never as a community advocate to keep ourselves together at the detriment of another. And for that to be the only option that kept us together felt like a clear signal that 1) they didn’t understand our program, and 2) that they weren’t really listening to us – or were moving so far ahead [in the process] that they couldn’t listen to us.”
For Monday, at least, the Glenwood community’s focus shifts to ensuring students and teachers start the year off well. Despite undergoing a principal change, most educators are staying and are dedicated to maintaining the special programmatic experience. Rossi said the PTA is brainstorming ways to honor the Glenwood building before its closure, including a goodbye celebration that will welcome back former teachers and students.
Dawson said his family is going to approach the final year in the Glenwood community no differently than before, except for appreciating as many moments in the school as they can.
“It’s going to be a great year,” he said. “I’m very excited to walk into that school with both of my kids. My daughter’s proud to have her little brother to show off – she’s going to take care of him, it’s going to be a great year. There’s no point in not trying to enjoy every bit of what Glenwood has to offer all the way to the end.”
During Thursday’s “Back to School Night” ahead of the school board’s vote, Berdeja said her spirits were lifted by returning to the elementary campus. She got to meet her son’s first grade teacher, who seems “amazing,” and her family is encouraged by the staff’s commitment to the students.
Just a few hours later at the board meeting, though, she felt even more frustrated. Berdeja holds a deep suspicion that the district will aim to disband the Mandarin world language pathway instead of adopting it at Scroggs Elementary School, which the district designated as a landing spot if the program continues. She said she is considering other options inside and outside of the district, saying she wants to prioritize the best academic situation for her son even if that means moving to a private school. A major takeaway from the experience, in her mind, is just how little say the public has over issues like a school closure and move.
“I really do not like having people deciding on my child’s education in such a light manner,” Berdeja said, referencing the board’s discussion and vote. “It bothers me to not have control of my child’s education.”
“Many promises have been made,” Rossi added, “and so many promises have already been broken that we just don’t see a clear path to success [for this transition], unfortunately. And I think that responsibility has to be placed on the district and the board.”
Featured photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.
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