Chronology

Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools form a Blue Ribbon Task Force after Black parents press on the achievement gap

Black parents demanded more resources for disadvantaged students, and the district responded with a Blue Ribbon Task Force. The article judges that it changed little: the gap between Black and White test scores, tracked since the 1980s, narrowed only slightly.

Subject: Chapel Hill and Carrboro city schools

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board adopts its school assignment and reassignment policy

Policy 4150 set the rules the district followed when it redrew attendance lines. As revised on April 2, 2009, its priorities for reassignment were walk zones, full use of buildings and equity, meaning balanced family income and achievement among schools and short travel times.

Subject: Chapel Hill and Carrboro city schools

The 2010 census counts the Asian American population of Carrboro and Chapel Hill

Asian Americans were 8 percent of Carrboro's 19,582 residents and 12 percent of Chapel Hill's 57,233. Chinese residents were the largest Asian group in both towns, while people from Burma made up a fifth of Carrboro's Asian population and 6 percent of Chapel Hill's; 24 percent of Carrboro residents and 16 percent of Chapel Hill's were born abroad.

Asian Americans are the largest racial minority in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools and in Chapel Hill

By 2012 Asian Americans outnumbered every other minority group in the school district and in the town of Chapel Hill. In 2012-13 they were 15 percent of district students and 31 percent at Seawell Elementary, where many Chinese immigrant families had settled.

Subject: Chapel Hill and Carrboro city schools

Section 74A parents organize to stay out of the Northside redistricting

Parents in the Larkspur, Parkside and Northwood neighborhoods, most of the vocal ones recent Chinese immigrants, started an online group, met at the Chinese school, petitioned the board with hundreds of signatures and wrote letters to the Chapel Hill News. They backed Plan 4.1, the only draft that kept their children at Seawell, and drew up alternative assignment plans of their own.

The Asian American Parent Advisory Council declines to back the Section 74A parents

The council, a parent group formed to represent Asian American families in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools, said in a letter to the Chapel Hill News that it did not see the redistricting as a racial matter and would not join the opposition. Its vice chair said she also hoped to counter a growing belief that Asian American parents were racist.

Subject: Chapel Hill and Carrboro city schools

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board decides to build a new Northside Elementary on the old school's site

The board announced a new elementary school on the grounds of the Northside school that had closed in 1966, to carry the Northside name. Black families in the Northside neighborhood, whose children had been bused to other schools for decades, welcomed it as a return of their school.

Part of Historic Black neighborhoods of Chapel Hill and Carrboro · 78 events

Subject: Chapel Hill and Carrboro city schools · Northside School

The school board votes 5-2 for the attendance plan that fills the new Northside Elementary

After two months of public hearings on four draft plans, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools board chose Plan 2.1, which spread at-risk students most evenly among the elementary schools and reassigned about 1,045 children. Most came from the two schools nearest Northside, including crowded Seawell Elementary, and the whole Section 74A area north of town was moved.

Subject: Chapel Hill and Carrboro city schools · Northside School

Lee Charter School, the first charter school proposed for Chapel Hill, fails to open

The school, meant to serve minority and low-income students and narrow the achievement gap, had been set to open in fall 2012 and was put off a year while it looked for land and space. It then broke with its parent company and never opened, and most Section 74A families sent their children to Northside.

Hongbin Gu is elected to the Chapel Hill Town Council, its first Asian American member

Gu, an immigrant from mainland China and principal of Chapel Hill's first Chinese school, had counseled Section 74A parents during the 2012 redistricting fight. She won a council seat in 2017.