How Orange County Got to the Upcoming School Bond Referendum

Culbreth Middle School in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School District. Photo by Corleco from Wikimedia Commons.

Plans are afoot to bring a new referendum to Orange County voters in 2024: Should there be a bond for $300 million of additional funding for the Orange County and Chapel Hill-Carrboro school districts? Building on another $120 million bond passed in 2016, such a measure would provide money for both school districts to improve their buildings, at the cost of raising property taxes.

Such a bond would fulfill many pressing needs in the school districts, given that both have a large maintenance backlog. For example, Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board member Rani Dasi highlighted the need for major renovations at Carrboro Elementary. The last bond was estimated to be insufficient to cover the need for renovations to Lincoln Center and Chapel Hill High School, with the latter finishing right before the 2021-2022 school year. Yet, renovations can be quite costly, with the school district projecting figures as high as $20 or $30 million for the renovations to some older elementary schools.

Things don’t look much better elsewhere in the county. A report from the consulting firm Woolpert highlights that Orange County Schools also has much-deferred maintenance, including paving at both Orange Middle and Orange High. Similarly, New Hope Elementary is considered a candidate for replacement because of its pressing facility needs.

“Over the past 30 years, our school district grew a lot,” Dasi says. “And so the funding that was allocated for capital was invested in new buildings. So the maintenance and repair of our existing buildings was deprioritized. And we’ve got really dire needs for safety.”

To understand why one bond is required to fund two school systems within the same county, it’s important to go back to the history of the two school systems. In the 19th century, small schools that operated for only a few months out of the year sprung up across Orange County, buoyed by government funding. Chapel Hill first received its own school district in 1909, when it was limited entirely to white students.

African-American students were initially still part of the Orange County school district, but would later join the Chapel Hill district in 1930. The Orange County Training School, later to become Lincoln High School, was the high school for this population. However, the resources provided to Lincoln were still worse than those provided to schools serving the white population, much like the separate-and-unequal status quo elsewhere in the South.

In the 1960s, Chapel Hill-Carrboro (as Carrboro had now joined the school district) began the long and slow process of desegregation. While disparities between the African-American and white populations of the county remained a major concern, this process upheld the standards established by the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education. Orange County Schools were only slightly behind, with students from Central High School desegregating Orange High School en masse in 1968.

However, the two school districts still remained separate. Ever since Chapel Hill had gained its own school district, it has also had the power of taxation to fund it. As the district had expanded to include the African-American population of Chapel Hill and the nearby town of Carrboro, those municipalities had to assent to additional taxation.

Yet elsewhere across North Carolina, city school districts were merging with the school districts of their counties at large. In 1992, nearby Durham County merged its poorer and heavily African-American city school system with the county school system. 

On the other side of Orange County, the Alamance-Burlington School System was formed by a merger of school districts serving Burlington and the rest of Alamance County in 1996. Like Chapel Hill, Burlington used a supplementary tax to produce better-funded schools that created better results for students. While part of the motive was to equalize educational funding and outcomes across the two districts, it also came with the intention to save money by combining administrative positions that were redundant between the two.

This raises the question of how Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and Orange County Schools have remained separate until the present day. It wasn’t impossible that the school districts could have merged. Not long after the merger in Alamance County, proposals for a merger became a hot topic of debate among the Orange County Board of Commissioners. Merger would continue to pop up as an issue in elections until 2006, spilling over from Board of Commissioners races into contests for Orange County School Board.

On the Board of Commissioners, Moses Carey enthusiastically advocated for the merger. But two groups of citizens emerged to oppose any proposals. In Orange County, Citizens for a Sound Economy, a conservative group campaigning against taxation, mobilized public opposition through concerns that it would raise taxes in the rest of Orange County. Down south in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, NoMerger.org gained support primarily from more liberal voters who favored the additional taxation for education.

Besides the ever-present third rail of funding and taxation, another concern about mergers, which also popped up in Alamance County, came from the possibility of countywide redistricting. If students were to be shifted from more crowded schools in the south to schools with extra space up north, this could necessitate longer bus rides. 

While this would represent a significant cost to families, it could also come with the benefits of relieving overcrowding and possibly increasing socioeconomic and racial balance across schools. Furthermore, many students in southwestern Orange County, by White Cross, live closer to schools in Carrboro than the schools in their district.

Similar to Alamance County, there were also claims that the merger would result in cost savings. One source of these savings would be a reduction in administrative positions. Still, another way to save would be to reduce the need to build new schools if student populations could be equalized by redistricting. An additional point of discussion noted by former Chapel Hill Town Council member Gerry Cohen is that a merged district would have a population dominated by the southern part of the county, blunting rural and northern concerns.

Public reaction to this proposal leaned negative. In the 2004 election for the Orange County Board of Commissioners, Valerie Foushee, who had been endorsed by NoMerger.org, won one seat. Foushee, who before then was a Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board member, later went on to serve in the State House and Senate and was elected to the United States House in 2022 as the representative for Orange County. But the other seat went to the merger advocate Moses Carey.

However, this did mean that incumbent Margaret Brown, who took no side on the merger, lost. So did another candidate endorsed by NoMerger.org, Pam Hemminger, although Hemminger would later serve on the Board of Commissioners before becoming the mayor of Chapel Hill.

By 2006, the energy surrounding the merger was flagging in the local community; NoMerger.org’s last news update was about 2006 primary endorsements for the Orange County Board of Commissioners. They endorsed Alice Gordon and Fred Battle; however, Barry Gordon instead continued his service on the Board of Commissioners, being joined by former Carrboro mayor Mike Nelson.

Although the merger faded and school district consolidation elsewhere in the state slowed to a trickle, the core issues that drove the debate still remained. Chapel Hill and Carrboro continue to receive additional funding from their property taxes compared to the rest of Orange County. According to U.S. News & World Report, 31.1% of students in Orange County Schools are economically disadvantaged, compared to 17.2% of students in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. CHCCS also has more Asian students and fewer Latino students.

Instead, proposals to allow the splitting of school districts have gained more traction in NC state politics in recent years. Larger school districts can face additional problems with inclement weather if the entire school district must be closed because of problems in one part of the county. Some advocates of smaller school districts have also cited the benefits of increased competition, because it makes it easier for parents to move to another school district if it is close by. 

Part of the issue is that there is no academic consensus about whether large or small school districts are good for cost and educational performance. As NC Policy Watch reports, while smaller schools seem to help students, that cannot be extrapolated to smaller school districts. One paper claims that school district sizes above 15,000 and below 4,000 suffer from higher costs. Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools has 11,371 students, while Orange County Schools has 7,066.

But one major disadvantage of smaller school districts, according to Erika K. Wilson, a Professor of Law at UNC who studies race, education, and the law, is that they entrench socioeconomic and racial disparities. 

“I do think that, generally, I would take the position that we should not fragment school districts where the effect of the fragmentation is going to create social, economic, and racial disadvantage for more marginalized folks,” Wilson says. “So I think [merger] would be beneficial for the region as a whole, but maybe the Chapel Hill-Carrboro folks don’t see it that way. Because again, they lose some of the exclusivity and they might argue that it could decrease their home values.”

However, Wilson thinks that more powerful and necessary tools exist to equalize educational funding across North Carolina. In particular, she highlights the Leandro cases, in which the North Carolina Supreme Court stated that the state constitution requires the legislature to provide sufficient funding for all students to receive an adequate education. In 2022, the state Supreme Court ruled that NC is still out of compliance with that requirement.

This all links back to why Orange County finds itself in need of a school bond for two districts, after already having one in 2016. North Carolina is 46th out of the 50 states in spending per pupil, so there’s less money for these large-scale projects. Even though CHCCS gains extra funding thanks to its property taxes, it still considers itself to have less funding than peer districts in other states.

The school bond for $300 million would further increase property tax for both parts of the county. Local political group TriangleBlogBlog, which supports the proposed bond, cites a raise of $36 per month in property tax on a $500,000 home under the provision. Many other school districts across the state have also found themselves in this position. For example, Durham County approved a $423.5 million bond for school funding in 2022. Alamance County also approved a $125 million bond for its own schools in 2018.

Like the former proposal for a merger, the new bond referendum would change the tax structure of the county in order to improve education. But there are major differences between the two. While a merger would have equalized funding throughout Orange County, likely by bringing the tax rates to some kind of intermediate rate, the bond would increase the amount of funding equally to both districts despite the pre-existing disparities. Although the 2016 bond distributed funding based on student population, this one will distribute it based on the needs of each school district. However, school board member Dasi notes that the two metrics produce almost exactly the same distribution of funding between the two.

The merger also affects more than just funding, unlike bond proposals. But, even without a merger, the two districts have achieved some of the objectives of the merger through closer collaboration.

“In the places where we can benefit from collaboration, we already do that,” Dasi says. “So we have a joint bus maintenance service that Orange County Schools actually leads, that really is valuable, and then we continue to look for other ways that we can operate with synergies and savings across the districts.”

Finally, unlike the merger proposal, the upcoming bond seems highly likely to pass despite its size. 76% of voters backed the 2016 iteration. So, even if the higher price tag turns off some voters, plenty of supporters remain. 

Still, these similarities raise the question of why a merger hasn’t made a comeback: if we can pass a large bond, why not merge the two systems? Its supporters haven’t totally vanished; Libbie Hough, a former member of the Orange County Board of Education, notes that merger is “an issue of equity and equity should always be on the table.” But Triangle Blog Blog’s long article on the upcoming bond never mentions the proposed merger, showing its decreased salience.

The combined sum of additional school bonds and additional collaboration between the two school districts doesn’t quite equal a merger. Yet it does show that the two were able to forge a pragmatic and popular path towards reaping some of the same benefits while avoiding anything that would force Chapel Hillians, who don’t shy away from tax hikes, and the tax-averse residents of Cedar Grove to pay the exact same amount. It might not have the promised socioeconomic benefits of a full merger. Still, these bonds provide an alternative path for the two school districts in Orange County to make up for the low funding of schools in North Carolina.