A ten-year partnership between UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and Union Baptist Church in Durham is about to produce a tuition-free private school. Reports in today’s News & Observer and Sunday’s Herald-Sun say the K-8 school will teach 250 students. There are signs that suggest keeping an eye on this program. For one thing, one of the founders says in today’s article that the program is needed because their earlier initiative, an after-school program called Durham Scholars, was fighting contradictory messages from their students’ public schools —
The program would teach high expectations, but some students did not get that message in the classroom, he said. North/ East Central Durham feeds into some of Durham’s poorest schools, where teacher turnover is high and many of the teachers are the least experienced. …
“It costs money to educate these kids, and not enough resources [in the public schools] are being allocated,” Johnson said. …
— but obviously more money is not the complete answer here either. Construction for the school is only slated to cost $4.5 million, a fabulous fortune for most church schools but just a pittance in the public arena.
On the other hand, this is not a church school, by the usual definition. According to the Durham paper, Organizers said the school would not require theology or religion courses, which seems to me to be quite a trade-off for a program so closely associated with a Baptist church. It may also be debateable whether anything sponsored by a UNC program can be called fully private — maybe we could say “semi-private”, though the funding for staff and equipment seems to be developing from private sources and the state money may be minimal after all.
Either way, it looks like a step in the right direction for these families as well as the taxpayers.
