The biggest crisis facing Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools might be leadership

Kids bringing weapons to school. Repeated instances of sexual assault and possible Title IX violations. Teachers resigning and retiring practically en masse.

By most accounts, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools may be hitting a low point.

We’re not even halfway through the school year, and 23 guns have been found on CMS campuses or buses — an average of one every three days. That breaks a record set in 2018-19, when 22 guns were confiscated over the course of the entire school year.

We’ve seen a repeated pattern of sexual assault being reported and dealt with poorly, most notably at Hawthorne Academy, where a student was punished after telling school officials she was sexually assaulted in a bathroom on campus. Administrators who mishandled sexual assault reports have been quietly transferred or suspended with pay. Sexual assault survivors are left out of investigations; their suggestions for repairing a broken system go unheard.

Teachers, meanwhile, are exhausted. As of Dec. 7, 871 teachers had resigned or retired since the school year began — nearly 10% of the total teacher workforce.

The district’s leadership is being tested, and so far, the response has eroded public trust in school officials who haven’t met the urgency of the moment. Superintendent Earnest Winston and the Board of Education have been slow where they should have been swift, retroactive when they should have been proactive. When they do act, it’s too often hardly more than a Band-Aid fix — and sometimes, it’s just plain wrong.

Even the priciest measures, like a stunning $442,000 worth of clear backpacks and $48 million for teacher bonuses, fall woefully short.

Clear backpacks will do little to make schools safer, even if convincing thousands of high schoolers to use them is something the district can manage to pull off. While experts vary in how to tackle the issue, a lot of them say clear backpacks really aren’t that effective in the end. Many schools that adopted clear backpack policies, including Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 students were killed in 2018, have ended up dropping the requirement because the backpacks caused more trouble than they were worth.

Nor are $2,500 bonuses — which only amount to about $800 after taxes — likely to incentivize overworked and underpaid teachers to stick around. While CMS doesn’t have the power to raise teacher salaries, they could give them higher bonuses if they wanted to. Wake County, for example, will give its teachers a total of $5,000 in bonuses.

“Yes, CMS students are safe in our schools,” Winston said at a press conference after a student fired a gun outside West Charlotte High School Monday afternoon. “And I will say that unequivocally.”

But a lot of students don’t feel that way, and parents aren’t buying it, either.

CMS is hoping its efforts will be enough to make students feel protected and remind teachers that they’re valued. But what happens when clear backpacks don’t stop weapons from making their way onto school grounds? When the bonus checks are spent and teachers still find themselves struggling to make ends meet? When its Title IX problem continues to fester?

Of course, managing a school system the size of CMS is a difficult job, and it can be easier to get things wrong than it is to get them right. But rather than learning from past mistakes, CMS is repeating them, over and over.

Winston and the school board are asking students and parents to trust them, but they haven’t done enough to earn it. They also say that keeping kids safe is a joint effort. That’s true, but our school district and its leaders are failing. Teachers are leaving. Families are, too. CMS is in crisis, and it’s one that starts at the top.

This story was originally published December 14, 2021 at 3:05 PM.