The following letter, forwarded to the Weekly Sun for publication, was submitted to the Johnston County Board of Education in response to an invitation for support of a state legislative proposal to have future members elected by districts:

A request was received from you asking Concerned Citizens for Successful Schools (CCSS) to support your petition to have future Board of Education members elected from each high-school attendance area (with North Johnston High combined with Princeton High). The petition also said additional members could be added to represent future high school areas.

Concerned Citizens for Successful Schools does not support your petition.
Some of our reasons include:

(1) This is not something to rush into. A thorough study of districting usually enlists guidance from the Institute of Government or other qualified advisors, has public input and discussion, and strives to protect equal representation, especially from our minority population.

(2) There has been no transparency in your process.

(3) It is feared that your strategy will pit attendance areas against each other. It is also feared that future school board members will serve only their areas and not the county as a whole. We believe this is harmful.

(4) We are concerned that basing school-board composition on high-school areas would further politicize the selection of future sites for high schools.

(5) Most boards do not function well if they are too large because it is hard to reach a consensus. It is feared that a board with more than seven members would be ineffective and subject to control by the full-time staff. The petition says that even more school board members could be added as new high schools open. We think this is a bad idea.

(6) We believe a decision to go to election by districts should be made after the 2020 election when new members are in place and a new superintendent has been employed for a while. The current Board of Education members need to put their efforts into building back public trust in their ability to make wise decisions for the good of the whole school system.

Years ago, CCSS asked the Board of Education to employ OREd (Operations Research and Education Laboratory at N. C. State University) to examine ways to better balance the attendance areas. We still encourage you to do this.

A number of our schools are concentrated with poverty and low-performing students. Attendance lines haven't been reasonably addressed in years. Our schools reflect the imbalance.

We hope the new school board will be open-minded and will allow a thorough study of the attendance lines.

---SUSAN B. LASSITER, chair, Concerned Citizens for Successful Schools

EDITOR'S NOTE: This group of citizens came together several years ago to address attendance districts and other concerns related to Smithfield-Selma High and its feeder schools.