NAACP misses target on merger issue

For some reason, it believes it can convince the county commissioners that merger is the right thing and tug at their heartstrings by sending students to their meetings as they did Monday.

The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is misguided in their attempts at school merger and is misguided when it sends students to meetings to plead the have pity on me game when this is clearly a school board issue.

Commissioners, as board member Rives Manning pointed out, do not control curriculum. This is solely a school board matter and the fact the school board doesn’t offer advanced placement classes or a plethora of other things is clearly not the fault of the board of commissioners but a failure by the board of education to see these things are in place.

We grew up in the Hertford County public school system where there were advanced classes and this was long before such things were the norm.

That the Halifax County school system doesn’t offer these is no fault of the county commissioners, it is only the fault of the school system itself.

Manning, in a letter sent earlier this week, explains whether there is one county wide school district, or three districts, as in Halifax County, the elected school board trustees have the responsibility of educating the students in their district. The school district’s funds come from local, state and federal sources.

(Manning’s complete letter is attached at the end of this editorial in a PDF file)

Local funds for the schools can come from more than one source. The county commissioners can allocate funds to the schools. In Halifax County, the commissioners allocate funds to each district. It is based on the average daily attendance numbers, called ADM. The amount of funds going to each school district is exactly the same amount per pupil based on the ADM. Weldon City Schools and the Roanoke Rapids Graded School District each have a supplemental school tax, which was established by the legislature or by a vote of the people in their districts. “The Halifax County School District does not have a supplemental school tax,” Manning writes. “It was voted down by the citizens in May 2012.” The Weldon City School District supplemental tax rate is 17 cents per one hundred dollars on the property in that district. The Roanoke Rapids Graded School District supplemental tax rate is 21 cents per one hundred dollars on the property in that district. The property owners in the RRGSD and the Weldon district are paying a higher tax rate than the property owners in the Halifax County School district.

The problem, we believe, is not within the board of commissioners but the board of education, who have not proven themselves worthy stewards of their funds and yet the NCAAP wants to declare civil rights violations when it is clear to us the school system itself is doing the students the injustice by not seeing to their educational needs.

Manning continues in his letter, “The Halifax County School system has been very late on several of their audits. Their audits for the years ending June 30, 2008 and June 30, 2009 were not delivered to the county until November 2011. Their audit for the year ending June 30, 2010 was not available until March 2012 and their audit for the year ending June 30 2011 was not delivered until September 2012.”

Each of the Halifax County school audits had many deficiencies noted. Some were for violations of state laws and some were for not providing documentation for expenditures. There were notations of several hundreds of thousands of dollars that were “missing” and unaccounted for.

There were also bills that were not paid until court actions were taken. “The School Board has not made any effort to locate those missing funds,” Manning writes. “The Halifax County School Board of Trustees has the responsibility and duty to account for the funds and provide the students with a good education. Some of the Trustees have been on the school board for over 10 years.”

We agree with Manning and Monday saw firsthand the problems within the school district when one of the students read from a research paper signed off by a teacher that was only three pages long with no footnotes and quoted a University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights study, the North Carolina Constitution and apparently some research from newspaper articles.

While we hate to criticize the work of students, this research paper would not have passed in the Hertford County school system yet it was deemed acceptable in the Halifax County school system and hardly won us over that merger is the right thing to do. In fact, it made us think the opposite, with references to Jim Crow laws and not holding the school system itself accountable for these problems.

We believe instead of constantly nagging the commissioners, the NAACP needs to hound the root of the problem, the Halifax County school system.

The only injustice being done to these students is the injustice coming from the ones administering their future — Editor