Neighborhoods
By Geoff Green and Ruby Sinreich
With the the new Northside Elementary School, a.k.a. elementary #11, set to open next summer (as well as Frank Porter Graham Elementary School's transition to a dual-language magnet school), we'll be forced to go through another dreaded reassignment process to balance enrollment and capacity at our oft-crowded elementary schools. Superintendent Tom Forcella issued a memo on August 2 (PDF) about how this could go.
Forcella says he expects to reassign over 1,000 elementary school students. A redistricting team of 8 staff members has already been created. They are charged with creating three plans to be reviewed by a Redistricting Advisory Council, made up of staff and parent representatives from all the elementary schools and from Carrboro High School, which will recommend one to the School Board.
The informal foot path connecting Estes Park Apartments and Pleaseant Drive in Carrboro is a critical link for hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists like me who don't want to brave the shoulders of Estes Drive. I hadn't been there in a while due to the idiotic closure of the Merrit Crossing, but I walked through yesterday and found that the residents of the co-op housing on Crest Street (which backs up to the path) have been inspired by Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree (a book I still can't read without crying) to create "The Giving Communitree." It's a collection of little spots and works of art with books, art, and other gifts to share with anyone who wants them.
I took some pictures.
This month the Town of Chapel Hill followed up on their promise to help create a community center for the Rogers Road neighborhood by... shutting down the center that neighbors set up for themselves for code violations! What?
Did anyone at Town Hall think twice before doing this? Did anyone think 'given our huge debt to this community and our stated goal of supporting a community center there, how can we help improve this center and bring it up to code?'
No, as if they were computers instead of humans, they kicked the Rogers-Eubank Neighborhood Association out of their home. What were they thinking?
The Super 16th Annual Walk for Education will be held on Saturday,
October 13th at 1:30pm rain or shine. Walk for your school down
Franklin Street and enjoy the festive post-Walk carnival at Lincoln
Center. Fantastic inflatables, games, food and fun await you at the
carnival.
Date:
Saturday, October 13, 2012 - 1:30pm to 4:30pm
Location:
McCorkle Place to Lincoln Center
Back in March, members of the OCTS-Lincoln-Northside alumni group spoke at a CHCCS School Board meeting asking that we name the new elementary school, located between McMasters and Caldwell, "Northside Elementary" to continue the proud tradition of education that has occurred on that site.
In our board meeting tonight, there was a suggestion from a board member that we go ahead and act quickly on this, while we have plenty of things like Common Core and redistricting to worry about and we're down a staff member for community relations who would normally drive this process, and make the easy decision to name Elementary #11 as Northside Elementary.
OP has been a great source for name ideas before. How does this community feel about resurrecting the Northside name for this elementary school?
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