Municipal charter bill for Mecklenburg County towns is unconstitutional, lawsuit alleges

Two Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools parents and the NAACP are suing to challenge a 2018 law that allows four Mecklenburg County towns to start their own charter schools.

The law, House Bill 514, opened the door for the creation of municipal charter schools in Matthews, Mint Hill, Cornelius and Huntersville. Unlike regular charter schools, those charters would be funded by municipalities and were able to limit admissions to residents of the town.

The suit, filed in Wake County Superior Court, argues that the law effectively creates new school districts for the four predominantly white and affluent towns. It alleges that HB514 was passed in response to CMS’s proposed student reassignment plans, which were intended to break up concentrations of poverty in racially isolated schools.

“Proponents of the Town School districts decried CMS’ new student assignment plan as a threat to the composition of the mostly white and affluent ‘home’ public schools in the four towns, and thus set out to create public schools separate from CMS within their towns,” the suit said.

The suit, filed by the D.C.-based Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Charlotte law firm Tin Fulton, names House speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger as defendants.

CMS’s review and eventual revision of student assignment plans led to friction between the towns and the district. The suit alleges that HB 514 was used as a tool to limit the CMS board’s ability to address student segregation and concentrations of poverty. The “rancorous public debate” and the introduction of HB 514 in April 2017 ultimately led to the scaled-back reassignment plan that was ultimately adopted in May.

Bill Brawley, a state representative, sponsored HB 514, before he was defeated in his re-election bid in 2018.

While roughly 28% of students in CMS are white, the towns themselves are much less diverse, ranging from 64% to 79% white, according to the lawsuit. Municipal charters, which can limit enrollment by residence, would effectively exclude non-white students who do no live in those towns while diverting limited resources away from CMS and to the towns.

In August 2018, CMS sharply rebuked the towns for signing on to HB 514 with the adoption of the Municipal Concerns Act, which moved the four towns to the lowest priority for new construction. That move prompted swift backlash from the towns, further souring relations with the district.

But those tensions seem to have mellowed in recent months. So far, none of the four towns with authorization to create a municipal charter have made concrete moves towards doing so.

Cornelius and Matthews, meanwhile, have publicly renounced plans to pursue municipal charters. CMS responded in kind, removing them from the Municipal Concerns Act as a result.

Only Huntersville is actively examining the option of pursuing the municipal charter option.