That’s essentially what this article means. And you should care about it whether you have school age children or not, because it will impact you.
The county is 55 percent white according to Census.gov, yet only 32.5 percent of public school students are. What is happening here is that white enrollment in raw numbers hasn’t increased in a decade in our public schools, while minority enrollment has.
This is because middle class families with school age children — who tend to be white — know our public schools in this county are, with just a few quickly fading exceptions, largely unattendable. This is why for much of the earlier part of the decade we were adding a few hundred white students a year while white enrollment in surrounding counties grew by an average of 4,000 to 5,000 a year.
A shocking 25,105 students attend school outside the public school system in this county. Some 19,007 of them are in private schools and 6,100 are home schooled. Another 138,000 attend Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the public school system here.
That’s the significance of the 55 percent countywide white population versus 32.5 percent white school population number. Mecklenburg County is not a minority majority county, but its schools are majority minority because white, middle-class parents have flown the coop, creating a large, poor urban majority minority system where there need not be one.
What does all of this mean to you? That business owners and their employees considering a move to the county face the added financial burden of having to either put their kids in private schools or having to live outside Mecklenburg County and commute back in through some of the worst rush hour traffic in the country for a mid-sized city.
And yes, relocation firms that advise businesses do look at that among other factors. So do family owned pizza shops looking to take a chance on Charlotte. Closely.
