A Rural School Closure and a Community’s Fight for Identity
This story was reported and photographed during the summer of 2021.
I met with Jeff Church, the assistant superintendent of Caldwell County Schools, in the parking lot of Oak Hill School on a Monday morning in June of 2021. After reaching out to the school board, Church scheduled a time to let me inside of the school so I could take some photos of its interior before it was sold. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the local school board had fast-tracked a budget cut, a community input meeting, a final vote to close the school and, suddenly on Oct. 5, a plan to sell the school property to the highest bidder.
Oak Hill School, which served grades K-8, had been a part of the community since 1909, when it was housed in a two-story building down the road from where it sits today. In 1939, the Works Progress Administration worked with the community to build the new school and there have been structural additions and modern retrofits since.
Waiting outside in the parking lot when I arrived were two other men with Jeff Church, who I came to know as Greg White and Buck Deal. Both of these men are members of the Oak Hill Ruritan Club who were there to inspect the health of the interior. Greg wore a plain white T-shirt tucked into his blue jean carpenter pants that were cut to length at his ankles with the ends frayed. At 70 years old, he has been a carpenter in the community for 40 years. Buck wore his Oak Hill Ruritan royal blue hat on top of his head, with his glasses pulled down to the tip of his nose. He wore a green vest adorned with an endless supply of pockets that he used to carry all of his essentials, like his phone and a small 10-foot tape measure. Buck fired a volley of questions to Jeff Church and the Caldwell County Schools maintenance worker as we walked around the property, asking details about the HVAC system or termite inspections like it was his civic duty. A few other community members dropped in and out as the tour continued through the antique oak hardwood hallways of the school.
“These old oak floors are still good,” one community member said, looking at their feet as they paced down the hall of their old alma mater.
The entire Oak Hill community has been educated on this property for generations. The school has also housed Ruritan meetings, local basketball games in the sought after gymnasium, and, during COVID-19, the auditorium served as a place of worship for a local church. Some members of the local school board have had multiple generations of their family educated in the antique hallways of Oak Hill. Jerry Benfield, a community member who spoke during the community input meeting, said his family had been going to Oak Hill “since the last pandemic,” referencing the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.
“What’s going to happen to our community when you rip the heart out of it?” Benfield said during the meeting. “I don’t see that much savings just to kill our community.”
In June 2020, the Caldwell County School Board decided to close Oak Hill School for good. The school board was seeking to consolidate their public schools in order to cut $2.5 million from the district’s budget. At the board’s special budget meeting March 3, 2020, Caldwell County Schools Superintendent Don Phipps highlighted areas of proposed cuts to balance the budget for the coming year. Proposed cuts ranged from a reduction of $100,000 in transportation costs by consolidating bus routes and increasing ridership per bus to as huge as shuttering Oak Hill School.
Weeks later, many of the parents from the Oak Hill community called in during the community input session on March 31 to voice their concerns that closing Oak Hill would make for longer commutes for their students. The proposed cuts across Caldwell County Schools added up to $1.5 million — and with the added closure of Oak Hill School that added an additional reduction of $984,994, Caldwell County Schools would reach their $2.5 million budget cut goal for the 2021-2022 fiscal year. Despite Oak Hill parents’ strong opposition, the district moved forward with closing the school due to concerns raised by a great majority of parents from other schools in the district whose kids might have been affected by the options considered to keep Oak Hill School open. This decision displaced 124 students who had to attend other public schools across the district, sometimes traveling many more miles to get to school than they otherwise would.
A few months later in October, the school board decided to sell the property on which Oak Hill School sat. On March 9, the News-Topic in Lenoir, North Carolina reported that the real estate company 4M Investments, a venture capital and private equity firm based in Houston, had placed a bid for the property at $83,000.
Buck and Greg had joined the tour of the property as representatives of a group of community members who had set out to bid on the property for themselves. Both men spoke out loud and with full comfort about their grievances toward the Caldwell County School Board. The community felt cheated by not only losing their school but also the cornerstone to their “identity,” as Greg said. Even the name of the community is shared with the school, though the actual identifier to this geographic area is under the umbrella of the ‘Township of Little River.’
Throughout the day on which I took pictures of the soon-to-be-sold school building, Greg shared his positions on local, state, or federal government involvement in rural community issues. Others who had dropped in for the tour of the school property shared grunts and head nods of agreement as Greg gave voice to his opinions. Greg shared a story about helping a local community member build a house for his daughter, who was paralyzed from the chin down. Greg had been asked to build a simple ramp and a walk-in shower for her, with the father planning on using state government assistance to help pay for the work. Greg insisted the father do without the government assistance and work with locals in the community to build something better. With so many details, Greg shared a story of strong community involvement and camaraderie the U.S. hasn’t seen since the war effort of the 1940s. He concluded his story with an exclamation, “That’s what we can do together!” emphasizing not needing the government to help but depending on “the little people'' as Greg put it. But more importantly to Greg, this was an exercise of his Christian faith as a social good to the community. Now the cornerstone of their community, Oak Hill had been closed by government budget cuts. Greg and the others gathered had put their Christian faith into work by reviving this cornerstone but with a new set of values.
During the community input meeting, a local parent named Kelly McIntyre, daughter of Buck Deal, voiced her concern about the school’s closure. She gave an anecdote about her daughter “falling through the cracks” at another public school in North Carolina due to overcrowded classrooms. Many others in the input meeting had talked about the one-on-one atmosphere at Oak Hill and its strength of being able to offer low student-to-teacher ratios and educating a small, tight-knit community. McIntyre spoke of how Oak Hill could be a “role model” for other schools locally and across the state. McIntyre echoed Greg’s remarks of a “community coming together” in their efforts to move their students into the 21st century by buying Chromebooks for all of its students — which came about, she said, “because of the community’s efforts, not county government.” The local Ruritan club raised $15,000 to purchase Chromebooks for all of the students of Oak Hill to have their own individual laptops. No other school in Caldwell County has this access to technology.
Kelly McIntyre had children attending Oak Hill before it closed in 2020. As soon as she heard word that the school board was looking to close the school, McIntyre started looking into what it would take to start a charter school. Once the school closed, McIntyre started homeschooling her children, “I didn’t want my kids to go through that,” McIntyre said. A year later, McIntyre assembled a full board of directors for the charter school, including representation from various towns and regions around Caldwell County. “The school board has no diversity. They’re all Republican, and they’re all white,” McIntyre said. She boasted of the diversity present on her proposed charter school’s board of directors, including an Exceptional Children educator named Charmion Frizsell. McIntyre received her master’s in church leadership and works at the local Waterlife Church. She values public education and wants her children to be engaged in a public school environment to be able to work with people who may believe or have a different worldview than them. McIntyre wants to emphasize in the charter school a grounding in parental engagement in their students’ education. She talked about how teaching methods that are mandated by the federal and state governments are failing students and parents in gaining a better education.
McIntyre said she has no intentions of making the Oak Hill Charter School into a Christian school but did talk of ensuring there will be Bible clubs and other Christian-related after-school programs for the students to have an option of attending. Charter schools are required to be nonsectarian and must “be physically separated from any parochial students, and there shall be no religious artifacts, symbols, iconography, or materials on display in the charter school's entrance, classrooms, or hallways,” according to Chapter 115C, Article 14A in North Carolina’s laws on governing public schools.
Now since the school has closed, the community has rallied together to form their own charter school, which they hope will be housed in the Oak Hill school building. McIntyre is the chair of the board of directors along with Oak Hill locals and former teachers of Oak Hill School. Currently, there are no public charter schools in Caldwell County, the only other non-traditional schools being private Christian schools. Charter schools in North Carolina account for 126,000 students, representing 8.4% of the total public school population, according to a 2020 Annual Charter Schools Report published by the State Board of Education.
On July 1, the Oak Hill community hosted a community meeting with signs posted along the roads in the area promoting a call for action to “save our school!” The Ruritan Club and the charter school organized the meeting. The doors were open to the school property for attendees to take a tour of the building.
On this hot summer evening, as 23 concerned members of the community sat in the Oak Hill School gym to hear the prospects of saving their identity, Greg and Buck led the meeting discussing the health of the infrastructure the community was looking into buying. Greg, being a long-time builder in the area, went into detail about the roofing system, the crawlspace and floor system, the gutters and the state of the boiler system that is used to heat the almost century old building.
The community is looking to buy the school property through the Ruritan Club. Through local investors and public donations, the community has met the $376,020 bid they proposed to the school board, while still accepting donations. The Oak Hill Ruritan Club made this bid through their own non-profit company called Oak Hill Development, Inc., which upset the bid placed by LifePrep Projects, Inc, a non-profit focused on creating Christian elementary and secondary educational schools in the area.
At the conclusion of the meeting, Carol Deal, who is a member of the Ruritan Club, grabbed a mic to speak about the future and identity of the community through this school. “We’ve felt defeated,” Deal said, calling on those present to make a stand for their community. “It’s up to us. Think about the education of the children,” she added.
The group gathered together, bowed their heads, and a community member said a Christian prayer to conclude the meeting.
As of Aug. 3 the Caldwell County Board of Education signed the resolution for the sale of the Oak Hill School property to the Ruritan Clubs LLC, Oak Hill Development, Inc.
The Oak Hill Charter School is accepting applications and plans to have enrollment for the 2022-2023 school year.
