How a benches-clearing brawl spelled the end for private Charlotte Christian school

When Northside Christian Academy announced May 6 it would close after this school year, parents weren’t surprised.

“The school was headed in the wrong direction and headed towards closure,” said Keizah Shouse, whose son attended high school at Northside for the past two years. “Nobody was re-enrolling, so we were really forced to close.”

The school’s end began when a parent from an opposing team slugged a player at a boys’ basketball game in January and a benches-clearing brawl broke out, Shouse said. Afterward, school leadership expelled the player and unceremoniously ended the defending state champions’ season altogether. Shouse, whose son was on the team, said parents began pulling their kids out of the school.

Some parents say it was just one of a host of issues at the private school, including dilapidated facilities, tensions between parents and leadership and financial mismanagement.

The adjoining church, Northside Baptist, is remaining open.

“Unfortunately due to, but not limited to, low re-enrollment and the viability and sustainability of the ministry, we determined that it was necessary to close,” the school said in an email to parents May 6, informing them of the closure.

Basketball incident

Parents say Northside’s pastor, Michael Landrum, decided to forfeit the remaining games in both the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams’ season after the brawl at Hickory Grove Christian School on Jan. 26, despite the school’s athletic conference only suspending each school for one game.

“He really didn’t come out with a real explanation,” Shouse said.

Northside, which has grades pre-K through 12, was accredited by the Association of Christian Schools International, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and the North Carolina Association of Christian Schools. The school was also well-known for its sports teams, particularly boys’ basketball.

The school’s most recent basketball coach, Edward Cooke, said Northside administration was generally hostile toward his team.

“The boys would get reprimanded for little things,” Cooke said. “It didn’t feel like we were part of the school.”

After the season was abruptly cut short, Cooke left Northside. Many of the kids he coached followed suit.

“A lot of the kids were at that school because of me, so I brought in a lot of kids,” said Cooke. “I had 30 kids I was planning to bring into the school.”

That’s equal to a little over 10% of the school’s total student population of slightly under 300 students.

One parent said some teachers in the school had told parents that only around 60 students had reenrolled for the 2024-25 school year.

‘I was wondering where our money was going’

But parents say Northside was headed in “the wrong direction” long before January’s ill-fated basketball game because the school was in a state of “disrepair.” They say Landrum hinted at the possibility of closing it as far back as March. Parents wondered where the school spent money it received.

Tuition at Northside was about $9,850 to $11,650 per student, according to previous estimates on the school’s now-defunct website. The school also received $999,969 in state funding from the opportunity scholarship program over the last two years, according to the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority. The authority provides around $7,000 per student to families who want to send their child to a private school rather than their local public school.

Up until this year, only families with a household income below a certain threshold qualified for the program, but now, any family in North Carolina can apply for state funding to spend on private school, regardless of household income or whether their child already attends a private school.

Meanwhile, parents and teachers say the school lacked working heating and air conditioning. Cooke says the boys’ basketball team did not get rings after winning the state championship last year.

“They said they didn’t have the money and didn’t want to raise the money to pay for them,” Cooke said. “We also played half the season with no heat in the gym.”

Parents offered suspicions about how money was or wasn’t used, but Northside isn’t required to publicly release its budget in a manner similar to public schools.

“There was no air or heat in the school, but there was in the church,” said Felisha Wall, whose son was in eighth grade at Northside this year. “I was wondering where our money was going.”

Landrum says the church, daycare and school’s finances were all a part of the same annual budget.

“Northside Baptist Church ministries, including Northside Christian Academy and daycare all operate under one ministry budget approved annually by Northside members,” he told The Observer before declining to answer further questions.

The state does not require schools that receive opportunity scholarship funds to report how the money is spent.

The law stipulates the funding is intended to be used for “required tuition and fees,” but it doesn’t provide further clarification on what qualifies as an educational purpose the funds can be used on and what does not. This leaves schools themselves with a lot of room for interpretation.

Cooke, who runs his own basketball training business, said he feels for the kids.

“Northside was supposed to be an outlet for kids to get a good education and play sports, so it’s sad that the situation had to go down the way it did,” he said. “It’s just sad that it had to happen.”