Here are LCPS’s 2018 legislative priorities as presented to state lawmakers and local elected officials during the district’s annual Legislative Breakfast on Monday, April 16. Lenoir County Public Schools 2018 Legislative Priorities The Most Significant Issues K-3 Class Size Limits: We want to thank the N.C. General Assembly for working to create the recent changes to the original HB 13 and to create a more gradual approach of phasing in the changes in class-size caps.  This will provide our district and others with time to prepare in terms of additional positions needed and additional classrooms required.  Even with the more gradual approach,… read more →

When results of last spring’s state accountability tests were released on Thursday, LCPS took a well-deserved moment or two to celebrate the district’s academic improvement. Then everyone went back to work. As proud as we are of the district’s higher test scores, outstanding achievements by individual schools and some real growth spurts, and as much as our administrators and teachers deserve praise for the hard work that went into achieving those results, no one here is satisfied with where LCPS is and everyone here knows we have more to do. Still, there’s no denying LCPS is on a journey of improvement. Think of the reams of data… read more →

Hundreds of bills having to do with public education have been filed during the session of the N.C. General Assembly that began in January. Some deal with details, but many potentially have far-reaching effects on the way public schools and public school classrooms operate in the state. Other education issues, in our opinion, need airing but unfortunately have not found their way into legislation yet. As do all public school districts, LCPS has opinions on how the district would like to see things go in Raleigh, on what legislators could do that would best serve our students. The district was once… read more →

Amy Taylor says she “saw the good come out in people.” Sabrina Martiello remembers with sadness a list of street addresses, a catalog of homes made uninhabitable by flood waters. These are different dots on the same timeline — two weeks when the Neuse River and its creeks, funneling destruction and misery after the torrential rains of Hurricane Matthew, submerged property and washed away the routine of daily life around which people build plans and fashion their aspirations. The everyday came to a standstill in much of Lenoir County. http://tinyurl.com/yca2jdov Schools closed, of course, but while the buildings sat idle Taylor and Martiello… read more →

After last year’s long, drawn out discussions about a state budget, this year’s negotiations seem to be moving ahead at warp speed in the General Assembly. Two reasons: a lot of the hard stuff was ironed out in 2015, at least for this second year of the biennial budget, and it’s an election year, meaning many representatives and senators had rather be pressing the flesh than crunching numbers. With the so-called (and apparently literal) short session a month old, the House of Representatives approved its budget Thursday. It totals $22.2 billion — an increase of just over 2 percent compared to… read more →

State law requires public school districts to produce by May 1 each year something called a planning budget. It’s a best-guess sort of budget, one that school boards approve — as the Lenoir County Board of Education did this past Monday — with the hope that their benefactors in local, state and federal government are in on the plan. There is, simply put, more than a little uncertainty. For instance, state funds account for more than 60 percent of this district’s total revenue, but LCPS probably won’t know for months how much money the N.C. General Assembly will allocate for… read more →

Each year, prior to the beginning of a new session of the General Assembly, LCPS hosts a gathering of legislators who represent Lenoir County, along with members of the Lenoir County Board of Commissioners and Lenoir County Board of Education. This morning, at a breakfast held at the school district’s central office, these elected officials received a list of legislative priorities for the district from Superintendent Brent Williams — a list not much changed from last year due the General Assembly’s focus on other issues. Below are those priorities. The short session of the General Assembly begins Monday. It seems… read more →

With all the anticipation and even some anxiety, graduating seniors and their parents must feel like colleges choose them. First, though, the seniors have to make a choice; and with 110 public and private four-year colleges and 59 community colleges in North Carolina and another 4,000 of those institutions across the country, it’s a choice best made after some deliberation. So when seniors in LCPS’s high schools sat down last week to fill out online applications for colleges, they had already done some homework – with the help of their school counselors – about what schools looked like the best… read more →

We read in the local newspaper of Project Press, an effort by the Kinston-Lenoir County branch of the NAACP to engage parents more fully in their children’s education. http://tinyurl.com/qc66tz8 We have two words to say about that: Thank you. That a school district, its administrators, teachers and elected leaders, should be grateful for an initiative that recognizes the value of parental involvement in education is probably beyond obvious. People at home are on a par with people at school in ensuring academic success. But Project Press also elicits our gratitude because it acknowledges another truth about K-12 education: it’s the… read more →

More than two months after the beginning of the new fiscal year and nearly a month after the beginning of the school year, North Carolina has a budget. We wish we could say it was worth the wait; but given that its best feature — in terms of public schools — is that it’s not as bad as it could have been, educators are understandably more relieved than excited. Now that it’s over, it’s hard to imagine why education issues were among the sticking points that caused the delay. Funding pay increases for starting teachers just fulfilled a promise made… read more →