PENDER COUNTY — The Pender County Board of Education, only three-strong on Tuesday night, was poised to take up three contested topics — a three-tiered bell schedule, the naming of the new K-8 school, and the district’s instructional materials policy — yet ultimately avoided one and delayed the others.
READ MORE: PCS retracing steps on book challenges, policy change consolidates power to school board
At the beginning of the meeting, board member Tom Reeves motioned to remove discussion of policies 3200 and 3210 from the agenda; he and his colleagues, chair Beth Burns and board member Jennifer Hansen, voted to do so without discussion.
The policies refer to the selection and parental inspection of instructional materials and they aren’t new to being taken up by the board of education. In October 2024, the board voted to change policy 3210 to have any challenges on instructional materials come straight to the board instead of working their way through a school-level and then district-level review committee.
The new proposal is to reverse that policy decision. Upon a parent’s challenge to instructional materials, the proposed policy directs the principal host an informal meeting with the parent to discuss the complaint and challenge process. If the parent chooses to file a formal complaint, a school-level reconsideration committee would then be convened consisting of, at minimum, the:
- Building-level administrative team
- Media coordinator (non-voting ex officio member)
- Lead teacher from each grade
- Parent volunteer from each grade
The team will have 30 days to review the challenged material. If the committee determines the material is “educationally unsuitable, pervasively vulgar, or inappropriate to the age, maturity, or grade-level of students,” the committee can remove it from instructional use or modify its access, per the proposed policy. Removing the material from the library entirely would be for “legitimate educational reasons” subject to limitations of the First Amendment.
The committee’s decision could then be appealed to the Community Media Advisory Committee, made up of:
- Superintendent or their designee
- District technology director
- District director of digital learning and media
- Media coordinator from each level of school within the system (i.e., elementary, middle, high school)
- Principal from each level of school within the system
- Parent from each level of school within the system
- High school student
After the CMAC’s decision, if the parent still wants to appeal, it would be elevated to the board level.
Port City Daily asked the three board members why they decided to remove the policies from the agenda. Chair Burns was the only one to respond.
“I was told there is some proposed legislation in Raleigh that might affect policy 3200 and I also had two board members absent,” Burns said. “To bring the book committees with policy 3210 would be a significant change and I wanted everyone’s input.”
House Bill 595, sponsored in part by Rep. Frank Iler (R-Brunswick), proposes restrictions on book content in school libraries and classrooms, specifically prohibiting materials deemed “harmful to minors” as defined by state law. The bill also makes it easier to prosecute librarians on obscenity charges. The bill has not passed out of the House yet and remains in the rules committee.
Former board member Phil Cordeiro — who proposed changing the policy to a more streamlined process in October — emailed the board on Tuesday ahead of the planned discussion.
“A vote in favor of these changes is a vote against parents’ rights, a vote to add layers of bureaucracy where none should exist, and a vote in favor of recreating the circumstances that put gender theory education and inappropriate sexual content into our school libraries,” he said.
During his time on the board, Cordeiro was very vocal about his support for changing instructional material reviews and even pushed to ban a few books. In 2023, he wanted to change policy 3210 so that each time a book was challenged at one school, it would also trigger a challenge at every school with the same grade levels. Though this motion didn’t pass, the discussion included Cordeiro reading several sex scenes from challenged books aloud at a school board meeting.
The board has also withstood scrutiny from the public after it approved the removal of eight books from a list of 42 submitted to the board by members of the Pavement Education Project, a Durham-based “nonpartisan” group geared toward alerting parents to obscene books and materials in public schools.
Former school board member and current commissioner Brent Springer brought forth the list and was also in favor of changing policy 3210 last year; he was optimistic future boards would uphold the decisions.
“We have some great board members coming aboard very soon and may or may not agree with our decisions, but I think they will agree,” Springer said.
Three-tiered bell schedule
Three years since a three-tiered bell schedule was introduced to the board, the concept will have to wait another month for a vote.
A tiered bell schedule is when a school district staggers start and end times of the day, usually split by elementary, middle and high schools. The idea has been marketed as a way to alleviate some of the stressors on Pender County’s bus transportation system, which has been running double routes due to a driver shortage and the number of buses it has.
A tiered schedule hasn’t been very popular among parents and students, particularly those reliant on the school bus. The adjusted start times mean some kids will have to get on the bus earlier in the morning; some will return later in the afternoon. Concerns over the schedule aligning with parents’ work demands and having some drop-offs without an older child or parent present have been a big part of the conversation.
In 2023, the board voted to adopt putting the entire district under a three-tiered schedule, but walked it back four days before it was supposed to take effect.
The following year staff conducted a survey on three options for the bell schedule; the most popular only received 37.7% of approval. The middle schools would start the earliest at 7:30 a.m., elementary kids to follow at 8:15 a.m. and high school at 9 a.m. Though this option caused problems, particularly with AP and college-course students, and was scrapped again.
Chief Officer of Student Support Services Michael Taylor, having previously worked in school districts that utilized a tiered schedule, has been pushing for the Pender district to make the change since 2022.
There’s also more impetus now: NCDOT is requiring a staggered bell schedule for the incoming K-8 campus off N.C. Highway 210, in order for the district to obtain a driveway permit. While this requirement is only for this campus, the district wants to keep schools of the same grade levels on the same schedule.
“Without a driveway permit, we have a beautiful school that we can’t access,” Taylor said.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Taylor told the board staff had finally come up with a schedule that would satisfy the districts’ varied needs.
Taylor is now proposing a three-tiered system for implementation on the county’s more populated east side, which includes Hampstead, Topsail Beach and Surf City, and the beach towns, to eliminate 12 double routes. The district has 25 double routes this school year, up from 12 three years ago, and ridership has grown by 107 students.
However, if the same system was placed on the west side, it would create 11 more double routes, essentially making the program a wash. So, the recommendation is to maintain the west side’s current two-tier bell schedule.
“I have always supported a district perspective of ‘One Pender’ and said that many times, and I do believe in ‘One Pender,’ but it’s unfortunate in this scenario that we can’t all be on the same — it doesn’t make sense,” Taylor said.
Chair Burns agreed the transportation problem was not equal between the east and the west.
“Anybody who gets on [U.S. Highway] 17 in the morning will see,” she said. “The one thing I would say is the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; if we keep doing this over and over, the way we’re doing it right now, there will be no change to the traffic on 17.”
Under Taylor’s proposal, middle schools would start first at 7:30 a.m., followed by high schools at 8:15 a.m., and elementary schools at 9 a.m., ensuring “older siblings would be at the home when the youngest students are arriving home from school,” according to Taylor.
“We recognize there are still valid concerns about its implementation, parents have expressed worries about disruptions to their family schedules — earlier or late start times and our extracurricular activities, as well as potential inequities across different areas of the district,” Taylor said. “Additionally, logistical complexities, such as our longer bus rides or increased workloads for staff supervising staggered arrivals, must be carefully addressed.”
As for start times, Taylor reported the earliest bus arrival time in the district currently is 5:41 a.m. The new system would only bump this back by two minutes. As well, by moving up the high school start time, the district is providing 15 to 20 more minutes of instructional time for student athletes, who often have to leave early for away games.
Taylor said some people have requested high schools go first, but because the districts for each high school are much larger than the other grade levels, Taylor said this would put the earliest bus arrival closer to 5 a.m.
“You’re talking about thousands of hours that have been put into this project and we believe sending high school kids to school first is a significant negative impact on those students,” Taylor said.
The biggest impact is on afternoon release times, with elementary students getting out at 4:05 p.m. The PCS board members were concerned,bristling at a 9 a.m. drop-off for parents who often have to be at work by then.
Taylor pointed out if elementary schools don’t begin at 9 a.m., the other grade levels will have to be pushed back even earlier.
“I still have a problem with the 9 o’clock,” Reeves said.
Ultimately, Burns suggested to table the vote until the two absent board members could weigh in.
K-8 naming
On the agenda for a vote Tuesday was choosing a name for the district’s new K-8 school.
Based on a district-conducted survey, the most popular names for the schools are Hampstead Elementary and Hampstead Middle, obtaining 37.4% of the survey vote. The other options, in descending order by popularity, were Topsail for both, Hampstead Elementary and Topsail Middle, and East Pender for both.
Staff recommended the board go along with the top vote; however, board member Reeves had a different idea.
He proposed naming the schools after the Lee family, who started a fishhouse business and contributed to Hampstead’s reputation as a “seafood capital” of the Carolinas.
“Anything anybody ever needed in that community, if you needed something, you went to the Lees and they gave it to you,” Reeves said. “That’s the name I wanted it to be named after so we won’t lose our heritage.”
Burns said the survey had already been sent out before Reeves brought up the Lee family idea, but noted the board would give serious thought to his suggestion for future schools in the east side.
“I’m still going to have to fight for this,” Reeves said.
The vote was tabled for a future meeting.
Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com
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