School Board Elections
Gillie Weeks
Voters elected two first-time candidates and two incumbents to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City school board on November 7.
Amy Fowler led the race with 9,486 votes, followed closely by Mary Ann Wolf with 8,719. Incumbent Joal Hall Broun came in third. The three candidates will be serving a four-year term.
Incumbent and current board chair James Barrett gained the fourth most votes and therefore will be finishing out the term of Annetta Streater, who resigned from the position.
Orchestra Grant
Max Kurzman
The Chapel Hill High School Philharmonic Foundation, the non-profit booster supporting the school orchestra, was awarded a $5,000 grant in mid-November to help fund an upcoming trip for students.
Coastal Credit Union presented the large cardboard check to orchestra director Corrie Franklin, one of five winners of the 50 Forward Contest in Raleigh. Franklin, as well as the other organizations’ nominators, received an additional $5,000. Juniors Lizzie Kuhlman, Caitlin Su and Belinda Wang played violin alongside senior cellist Lanie Sopa at the event.
The grant will cover half of the travel expenses for orchestra students visiting Boston, Massachusetts, during the week after spring break. Nearly 40 students, including junior violinist Richard Gao, will learn from the Boston Pops Orchestra and perform. “It’s really unexpected, but it’s a pleasant surprise,” Gao said. “It lifts a huge burden off fundraising efforts.”
Franklin is also grateful for the contribution. “It’s especially critical this year that we got the grant because our normal fundraising venue fell through,” she said.
District SAT Results
Maritza Munez and Greta Timmins
The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores for public high schools in North Carolina were posted in early 2017, revealing that in the 2016-2017 school year the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system had the highest scores of any school district in the state.
In the 2016-2017 school year, 44% of North Carolina public high school students took the SAT and scored an average of 1,074, 30 points above the national average for public school students.
Chapel-Hill Carrboro students averaged a score of 1,231. Chapel Hill High School tested a total of 205 students, with a mean score of 490 for the evidenced-based reading and writing exam, and 520 for math. For comparison, East Chapel Hill High School averaged a score of 627 on the math portion of the test and 632 on the evidence-based reading and writing.
