Two Shelby elementary schools to permanently close. Here's what we know

Three Shelby area schools will close at the end of the current school year, two of them permanently.

The Cleveland County Board of Education voted on Monday 6-3 to close Graham and Marion elementary schools as well as moving fifth-graders at Shelby Intermediate School to elementary schools and sixth-graders to Shelby Middle School.

As part of the restructuring, the Shelby Intermediate School will be converted to an elementary school housing students from Graham and Marion.

Robert Queen, Rodney Fitch, Joel Shores, Greg Taylor, Ron Humphries and Coleman Hunt voted in favor of the reorganization. Phillip Glover, Danny Blanton and Dena Green voted against.

The reorganization was first suggested in January by McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture, a firm in the process of evaluating school enrollment and facilities for the district.

What you need to know: Five things to know about potential for closing schools in Cleveland County

Now that the reorganization has been approved, Cleveland County Schools will begin creating committees and transition teams which will plan for the pending reorganization. The district will have from the end of the current school year in June and the start of the 2022-23 school year in August to complete the transition.

During the public comment portion of the meeting, two people urged the board to reconsider the plan, or at least wait until the end of the next school year to begin the transition.

"I am not completely against the plan. I do understand the need and the plan. What I am concerned about is the timeline,” said Bradey Scott, a property owner in the Marion Elementary School area, teacher and parent of fifth-grader. "We know that when anxiety increases, learning and productivity decreases. It is simply not best practice to rush this through on the minimum time to prepare. Your teachers are overwhelmed, adding more to the plate which will inevitably cause a lot of extra time spent preparing this summer feels insensitive.”

Charlie Holtzclaw, who grew up near and attended Graham Elementary School, said closing two schools is just not what Shelby needs.

“I think it will have a dramatic effect on these children and their families. I worry about their sense of belonging being moved to a different school across town and also their self-esteem. Closing Graham Elementary School is the last thing that west Shelby needs. West Shelby needs a star, something shining,” he said.

In discussing the decision to reorganize the schools, Humphries said he has spent the last three weeks reading about the benefits of the intermediate school model versus a traditional middle school model.

“Every study I saw said fifth-graders are better in elementary. Sixth grade you could flip a coin. They are all over the place,” said Humphries.

Humphries added later that the board has a responsibility to put students where they will be better equipped to learn.

“Our first thing to do is to put the students in the best environment we can. Like (Stephen Fisher, schools superintendent) has said several times, Shelby Middle is the best school in the district because of the newness of it," he said. "I feel everybody’s pain. I felt the same pain with Kings Mountain, but at the end of the day I had to set that aside and do what is best for the entire Cleveland County not just a particular city.”

Glover and Blanton raised a list of issues with the organization plan, from a perceived rush to action and questions about including future developments in demographic studies.

Glover particularly took issue with the way architects were told to approach the facilities assessment.

According to guiding principles laid out in the assessment, one of the factors architects used to assess schools and plan the reorganization included a goal to eliminate the intermediate school model. That decision, Glover said, was made in committee and never approved by the full board of education.

“I think that should have been a decision made by the entire board, that we were going to get rid of the entire intermediate concept for Cleveland County Schools. That never came before the board,” said Glover. “If that was the direction – evidently that was the direction we were going to do – we missed the opportunity to include our parents and our stakeholders and look at the data that said that is what we needed to do.”

Dustin George can be reached at 704-669-3337 or Dustin.George@ShelbyStar.com.

This article originally appeared on The Shelby Star: Cleveland County School Board vote: 2 schools closed, one repurposed