Halifax by the numbers
If you read EdNC in 2015, there’s a good chance you saw an article about Halifax County. There is conflict on the Halifax County School Board. The County Commissioners are being sued by local community groups over the county’s three separate school districts (Halifax County Schools, Weldon City Schools, and Roanoke Rapids City Schools). And the state’s oldest and longest court case concerning the equality of public education across the state has frequently cited Halifax County as an example of how things have gone wrong.
Halifax, in many ways, is symbolic of other communities across the state, places left behind in North Carolina’s economic and demographic explosion at the end of the century.
Like those other communities, Halifax is populated with people who want to see it become a better place to live for their friends and families and the next generation who will call it home.
And, like so many other places around the state, Halifax County has a unique story to tell, one that can be lost in the hard news of the day.
At EdNC, we cover the news, but we also try to dig deeper into the issues that affect how kids learn in the classroom. If you want to help a child overcome the obstacles in her life, the impediments to education and learning, you have to understand what those obstacles are and where they come from. In the case of Halifax, you have to understand the long arc of the community’s story.
That starts with data.