Group talks about racial disparity in school achievement
It started on a playful note.
Brunswick County Schools Superintendent Katie McGee ducked under a desk and came out on the other side, at the center of a large room at Love Faithfully Ministries, a church in Leland. About 20 other desks flanked hers.
She went around talking to people and making jokes.
It was a way to break the ice on a subject that has upset black community leaders: the achievement gap between black and white students in Brunswick County, which has narrowed slightly in the past year but is far from closed. On Monday, McGee, other school officials and members of the religious community gathered at the church to once again discuss the gap.
In state standardized tests for grades 3 through 8 this year, 78.4 of black students were proficient in reading. That's 10.9 percentage points lower than white students, a gap that decreased from 13.4 last year. In math, 43.3 percent of black students were proficient this year, which brought the gap down from 27.6 percentage points last year to 27 this year.
Since the first meeting in May, cooperation has grown between local churches and the school system, McGee said. Love Faithfully Ministries now has a program that offers county students an alternative to suspension, giving them mentoring and 17 computers to work on.
"We have to get beyond the color thing," said the church's senior pastor, the Rev. Gene Brown, who launched the program at the start of this school year. "That way it doesn't become a black or white issue. It becomes an issue for the entire community."