Cumberland Board of Education celebrate county schools improvement, but say there’s more to go

Cumberland County Schools has much to celebrate. Last month, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction removed 17 county schools from the state’s low-performing schools list, decreasing the district’s total number of low-performing schools from 27 to 15 for the 2024-25 school year. 

CCS also recently received the Sandhills Region’s Science of Reading True Trailblazer Award, a state recognition for countywide improvements in students’ reading proficiency.

But at Tuesday’s Cumberland County Board of Education meeting, board members say there’s still more work to be done — and leadership needs more time to do it.

In total, the board members spent almost 30 minutes on Tuesday discussing their rationale for or against extending contracts of Cumberland County Schools Superintendent Marvin Connelly Jr. and his cabinet. The board members’ vote ended 5-4 in favor of extending the contracts by an additional year, ending them in 2028 instead of 2027, with no change in compensation. 

Both motions were made by Donna Vann — District 4 representative running for reelection to the board — and seconded by Nathan Warfel, the board’s vice chairperson also running for reelection and representing District 6.

For Warfel, the decision was based on improving district performance metrics.

“We’re still not where we wanted to be,” said Warfel. “But I think we’re getting close and I think we’re on the right path. For those reasons, I vote to extend.”

Cumberland County Schools did improve last school year. On top of 17 schools being removed from the state’s low-performing list, 55 schools increased their proficiency scores in 12 of the 19 subject areas tested on state-mandated tests.

Jacquelyn Brown, Deanna Jones, Judy Musgrave and Carrie Sutton voted against the contract extensions in both votes. In their view, current Cumberland County Schools’ leadership is not doing enough to address student learning disparities and support teachers.

“African American students are steadily going down the drain of dismal,” said Musgraves, one of the three at-large board members. “And many of my constituents are expressing dissatisfaction with leadership performance.”

According to the NCDPI’s District Proficiency Dashboard, white students in Cumberland County Schools are twice as likely as Black students to be considered career-and-college-ready. Only 23% of Black students in county schools are considered career-and-college-ready in 2024. The percentage is increasing, up by 1.7% from 2023.

The dashboard provides data on student subgroups, including racial subgroups of Asian, white, Hispanic/Latino of any race, Black, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native and students with two or more races. The county’s Hispanic students are also less likely to be considered career-and-college-ready. Forty-seven percent of white students were career-and-college-ready in 2024 compared to 33% of Hispanic students.

Vann pointed to decreased student performance because of the pandemic. She said those currently complaining about disparities were the ones who wanted to keep students learning remotely in 2021.

Before the pandemic, Cumberland County Schools had almost 55% of students achieving proficiency levels on end-of-grade and course tests, according to the Cumberland County Public Schools’ Data Release for the 2023-24 school year. That number dropped to 36.8% during 2020 and has since been steadily ticking up. In the 2023-24 school year, almost 51% of students were achieving test proficiency levels.

Jones, the board’s chairperson who represents District 2, said the disparities between minority students and white students existed before the pandemic. For the 2018-19 school year, white students were 1.8 times more likely to be career-and-college-ready than Black students, according to the Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s Racial Equity Report Card for Cumberland County Schools. The report card uses public data to report on racial disproportionalities in school districts across the South. The 2018-19 data is only slightly smaller than the 2023-24 school year numbers .

“I am not saying that I am satisfied with where we are, but we are improved in many places,” said Alicia Chisolm, District 1 representative who voted in favor of both contract extensions. “I don’t believe that you can get people to work harder and better at that job by constantly beating them on the head and telling them that they’re not doing nothing right.”

Chisolm is also up for reelection this year.

The narrow vote raised tensions from board members opposing the vote. 

“I just feel like the folks who said ‘No,’ including me, felt like we’re being attacked,” said Jones in her final statement on the matter in the meeting. 

CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the CityView News Fund.