The school board will be meeting with the county commissioners on Monday, September 16th at the Enloe Building at Tri-County Community College at 6 p.m. The Enloe Building is the second or 3rd building on your right if you pull into the main entrance at Tri-County. It's a large, tan colored building that houses the bigger auditorium on campus. The commissioners asked for this meeting for six months and kept insisting that public input be allowed at the meeting. The BOE finally agreed. The purpose of the meeting is for the commissioners and BOE to collaborate on a plan for the future of Cherokee County Schools, while also hearing from the public. We hope that a good number of people from Martins Creek, Brasstown, Ranger, and Hiwassee Dam will be able to attend this meeting. Otherwise, we fear that it will appear to the BOE and the commissioners that parents and community members don't have opinions or don't care when it comes to plans for school consolidation. Also, we fear that if only a few vocal people from the central part of the county speak during the public input, there will be a lot of reiterated myths, primarily that the smallest schools in the county are the most costly and inefficient and should be closed so that the larger schools cannot be better staffed (which is factually/mathematically false).
The commissioners have called upon the BOE to share specific, data-based plans and ideas.
Even if you have currently removed your children from CCS (by placing them in home school, enrolling them in public school in another county, or developing another arrangement), we encourage you to attend this meeting to listen to and/or participate in the discussion. We never know the future, and it's possible that your children or grandchildren could once again be enrolled in CCS in the future. Several of the suggested configurations for future schools in Cherokee County would create schools with more than 1,000 students in them. We don't believe that would be a good thing for anyone in Cherokee County, including folks who don't have children or grandchildren in school.
If you are unable to attend, the meeting should be viewable on the CCS YouTube page, local Channel 4, and the Cherokee Scout Facebook page, though the audio is often hard to follow when watching online.
