Former Chapel Hill Mayor and State Board of Education Chairman Howard Lee — the first black mayor elected in a predominantly white Southern City since Reconstruction — said he is surprised the NAACP is using a diversity argument to oppose plans to open a K-8 charter school bearing his name in Chapel Hill this August.

“I thought that was a weak argument and one that should not ever be elevated above educating our kids,” said Lee, who also is a former state senator and current executive director of the North Carolina Education Cabinet. The debate, he said, “should be about choice and it should be about education, and not about diversification.”

The NAACP’s opposition to the charter school, designed to close the academic achievement gap hampering minority children in Orange County, is emblematic of a national schism among blacks, an education expert says.

“There is a sharp divide in the African-American community between charter school opponents and charter school proponents, with one side believing that schools that mainly attract African-American students are beneficial and another side that believes such schools perpetuate segregation,” said Terry Stoops, education policy analyst at the Raleigh-based John Locke Foundation.

“This is a growing debate within the African-American community about charter schools and school choice that now is manifesting itself in Chapel Hill, of all places,” Stoops said.

The Howard and Lillian Lee Scholars Charter School is proposed as an affiliate of the for-profit National Heritage Academies management firm to resolve lagging academic performance in minority and low-income populations. It would draw students from both the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and Orange County Schools systems, according to its application with the state. National Heritage Academies says its schools in eight states ranked in the top 25 percent nationally in academic growth over the past five years.

Organizers, whose principal agent is the Lees’ daughter, Angela Lee, will be queried about the application by a state education panel this week.

“The opposition is almost basically about the same as opposition about neighborhood schools in Wake County,” said Rev. Robert Campbell, president of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro branch of the NAACP. “We’re going to create a segregated institution that are going to leave these kids out of the main population of the public schools.”

Campbell said the loss of tax money to the charter school is bad business in an economic downturn, overcrowding issues could occur if the charter school fails and all its students are later returned to public schools, and bullying issues could arise when minority students graduate eighth-grade at the charter and migrate to public schools where students are unaccustomed to dealing with minority peers.

“We believe that diversity is a core value of our community and of our school district. In particular we believe it’s important for students to have the opportunity to interact with as many people of different backgrounds as they can and to learn from those interactions,” said Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools spokeswoman Stephanie Knott.

“Depending on what those [enrollment] numbers look like, it could be between $4.5 million and $7 million” that the school district loses if the charter school is approved and meets its enrollment goals of 480 students the first year and 723 students by the fourth year, Knott said. The school system’s overall budget this year is $130.9 million.

“A successful experience in education should be the bottom line” in the debate, not color formulas, Lee said. “If a kid is being well educated in the Chapel Hill school system and the parent is happy, what reason would there be for a parent to take a kid out and move him to a charter school?”

Joel Medley, director of the Office of Charter Schools in the state Department of Public Instruction, said the diversity factor could play a role in the decision by the North Carolina Public Charter School Advisory Council on whether to recommend the application to the State Board of Education for approval.

“It’s something they do look at,” Medley said, because “the way the law is written it says [public schools] need to reasonably reflect diversity.”

“Each district has an opportunity to submit an impact statement … the council will see and use in their deliberations,” he said. The advisory council will be interviewing the 11 charter school finalists Tuesday and Wednesday and will review the school district impact statement as well as the charter application.

“You really can’t say which one has more weight than the other … the whole, total package is what they look at,” Medley said. Recommendations on the remaining 11 of 27 original fast-track applicants will be sent to the State Board of Education for consideration in February, and a final vote in March.

In the school district’s impact statement, Superintendent Thomas A. Forcella said the charter school would reduce the number of minority students in the local schools.

According to the Lee charter school application, 631 students from Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and 92 from Orange County Schools could be enrolled in its school by year four. It is not known how many of those might be minority students, but expectations are a majority of them would be.

Knott said 1,227 black students now are enrolled in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro district, or 10.8 percent of the student population. The numbers have been dropping steadily since 2002, when 1,586 black students represented 15.3 percent of the student population.

Forcella’s impact statement also referenced a trend of academic gains by black and Hispanic students in the past three years that are above state averages. It also stated that overcrowding at elementary schools, referenced in the Lee charter application, is being addressed by construction of an 11th elementary school. The school board approved demolition on an existing building on the site of the new school at a meeting last week, and is expected to approve a construction contract next month.

“I think when it comes to Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, one of the reasons they are opposing it is because they don’t want to communicate the perception that there’s an achievement gap,” Stoops said. “They’re embarrassed by the achievement gap, so the idea of having a charter school whose sole purpose is closing the gap would make them admit they’ve been ineffective at educating low-income and minority children.”

Dan Way is a contributor to Carolina Journal.