A rare and heavy snowfall in North Carolina, which closed schools across the state this week, prompted a second storm — this one on Twitter — with residents of the sprawling Wake County school district debating an idea to break up the city-county school district as a way of keeping kids in class during the winter’s occasional inclement weather.
While county schools officials welcomed the lively social media attention, they quickly nixed any idea of breaking apart the district out of misplace fear of snow days. Worse than making up for lost class time, officials said fracturing the district into two compact schools systems would be a retreat to the bad, old days of racially segregated schools.
Last Sunday, more than a dozen inches of snow fell across the state’s Raleigh-Durham area, accompanied by freezing temperatures that created hazardous travel conditions in a region where residents rarely encounter such frosty landscapes. So much snow fell, in fact, that some areas of the region exceeded the average snowfall for the entire winter season.
When bad weather descends upon the sprawling, 857 square-mile district, some 160,000 students and 10,000 teachers are forced to navigate a maze of urban, rural, and suburban roads to arrive at 171 schools. Before last week’s snow storm, which idled classes for three days this week, Wake County schools had already endured seven days of closures due to hurricanes and snow during the school year. These closures create a nightmarish transportation challenge, as well as additional expenses for the district to make up classes during holiday breaks, summer vacation, or on Saturdays.
But, safety first, so the Wake County schools closed most of this week to allow the roads to clear. Meanwhile, for the better part of a snowy Sunday, county residents debated the merits of breaking up the state’s largest school district — the 15th largest in the United States — as a national, cyber-audience joined in the conversation.
Apparently, the initial suggestion to split the school district in two followed an innocent, early-Sunday-morning tweet from @MrGurkinAHS, a science teacher at Apex High School in Cary, North Carolina, a bedroom suburb in the state’s Research Triangle, who urged students to prepare for cancelled classes.
To everyone asking about @wcpss canceling school…
1. Do your homework, whether or not we have school tomorrow.
2. Make plans for all possible outcomes (normal, delay, cancel).
3. Be patient. Wake is a big county.
4. After doing homework, enjoy the day.#staysafe #stayhometoday— Mr. Gurkin (@MrGurkinAHS) December 9, 2018
That Tweet drew a response from @csblack101.
#3 is the issue. there should be 2 school systems in wake county. conditions can be very different in different parts of the county.
— Corey Slack (@csblack101) December 9, 2018
But, to its credit, Wake County school officials rejected the idea of breaking up its boundaries, arguing that doing so would open a backdoor to racially resegregate the county’s schools. In fact, the district joined the debate, issuing its statement on Twitter and encouraging county residents to read the long thread that discussed breaking up the district.
“Long thread about our countywide school system and inclement weather. Grab a mug of hot chocolate and listen in,” the district said on its official Twitter feed.
Long thread about our countywide school system and inclement weather. Grab a mug of hot chocolate and listen in. https://t.co/l5LKWo2vYh
— Wake County Schools (@WCPSS) December 9, 2018
But while Wake School officials took a light-hearted approach to the issue, racial diversity is an important issue in the district, which has been subject to court orders on the matter. The district currently endeavors to maintain racially integrated public schools. Given the racial make up of housing patterns (black children live mostly in the city and white families are largely in the suburban, county areas), breaking up the Wake County school district would inevitably lead to creating an imbalance in that hard-earned diversity.
In fact, as a story in the Raleigh News & Observer pointed out, Wake County schools were separated into two distinct districts — a Raleigh City School district and a Wake County district — but merged in 1976 out of concerns that the city schools were becoming overwhelmingly black and lacked their fair measure of the community support that flowed seamlessly to the largely white county schools.
In another tweet, the district pointed this out: “Without countywide school assignments, we would have school segregation. Segregated schools are bad for students and bad for our community.”
When one of the largest school systems in the country claps back and ties a convo about inclement weather into the necessity of school integration, the world is a changing. https://t.co/uHv1eP8PlY
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) December 9, 2018
Clearly, the Wake Schools leaders understand and respect their community’s history and don’t want to return to separate and unequal education. Indeed, they’re to be praised for resisting the segregationist urge under the cover of inclement weather. It’s as rare — and refreshing — as snow in the South for a school district to defend racial diversity.