Senior Director of Magnet Program Recounts a History Filled with Choice
From her first days as a kindergarten teacher to her current role as senior director of the magnet program, Caroline Massengill has witnessed, first-hand, the development and growth of the Wake County Public School System's magnet program. As the school system prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary of the merger between the Raleigh City and the Wake County school districts, Massengill takes a look back over a career that has been all about choice.
Kindergarten as an Option
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| Caroline Massengill began her career with WCPSS as a kindergarten teacher in 1973. |
When Massengill first came to work for Wake County Schools in 1973, the state kindergarten program had just begun and was an optional program for the students.
"A lot of parents chose to keep their children in private kindergarten," she said. "There was a big debate in this state about whether it'd be half day or full day. The legislature decided to make it full day. It was wonderful."
Massengill taught kindergarten that first year at Holly Springs where13 kindergarten classes were all held in one building. She taught there for three years until the school system decided to move the kindergarten program into the elementary schools.
"There was no room in the Cary schools for kindergarten, so they put all the kindergarten classes there," she said. "The children were bussed to Holly Springs which had been an old elementary school. It was open to pretty much anyone. They did a lottery that first year. It was incredible being at that school because all the kindergarten classes were there in one location, and the Holly Springs community was great. It was a really good experience especially as a beginning teacher."
The Magnet Program Begins
When the kindergarten program moved into the elementary schools, Massengill taught kindergarten for several years at Swift Creek Elementary before moving to Washington GT Magnet Elementary to become involved in the system's new magnet program.
"(Superintendent) John Murphy started the magnet program in 1977, but the bulk of the magnet schools started in 1982 under Walter Marks," she said. "He called it the 'Schools of Choice' program. I remember being a teacher and the excitement that Walter Marks could make you feel as a teacher. He was such a salesperson that you were convinced - or at least I was - that if you didn't teach in the magnet program or have your child in a magnet school, you were losing out."
In response, Massengill enrolled her daughter in kindergarten at Washington, and she signed on as a first-grade teacher. Massengill said she remembers applying for the job and being asked what electives she could teach. Since she couldn't dance or sing, she wrote down cross-stitch. Despite her limited talents, Massengill said she got the job, but was never asked to teach cross-stitch. Instead, they had her teach K-2 woodworking.
"I knew zero about wood working," she said. "We had a few hammers, and I think we had two of those hand drills. I went out on weekends and after school to building supply places and anywhere I could think of begging for scrap wood and nails. And we hammered. I went out and got this huge log and just rolled it into the building, and the kids practiced hammering. I didn't know what I was doing, so I found this little woodworking book. Then I decided that all the children should have a project, so I found some simple ones, but some of the kids wanted to build birdhouses. So we made birdhouses - they were some of the most crooked things you've ever seen in your life!"
Massengill said she worked so hard that first year that she lost 15 pounds. "We were just working ourselves to death, but we knew that we had been chosen to be here," she said.
"We were selected to be in this school and people were coming to watch what we were doing, so we were determined to make it work. It was a real interesting time, a real exciting time and something that worked."
WCPSS Opens State's First Year-Round School
Massengill remained at Washington for three years and then became assistant principal at Farmington Woods Elementary. During this time, she said Wake County started a task force study group to look ahead at where the county should be in 10 years in preparation for the huge growth that was expected in the district. One group studied the idea of year-round schools to gauge community interest and the educational soundness of such programs.
After the study was complete, Wake County opened the first year-round school in North Carolina and the first year-round magnet program in the nation at Kingswood Elementary in 1989. Massengill was selected to be principal of the single track K-5 school that opened with 275 children.
"It was originally proposed to be a K-3 multi-track, but that didn't work," she said. "We couldn't get enough applicants because parents couldn't handle having elementary children on two different calendars, say if they had a second grader and a fourth grader. So we almost dropped it. Then Peggy Churn, who was director of magnets at the time, talked to people on a national level and decided to propose a single track K-5 school and see if that would fly, and it did."
Year-Round Program Expands
By the next year, Massengill said the population at Kingswood had grown to 315 students. She said there was more interest in the community than space in the school, so they approached the school board with the idea of turning Morrisville Elementary, which was being built a few miles down the road, into a multi-track year-round school
"The board decided, in February, to do it for the upcoming school year," she said. "So here we were with a brand new school, and it was a real scary piece. At that point, we had to get out and start recruiting, so we were going every night any where we could get two or three people together and tried to recruit them to come to Morrisville. Our whole school at Kingswood moved to Morrisville, and Kingswood converted back to a traditional calendar. That year, 1991-92, we moved from 315 students in the year-round program to 745 students."
Since there were no other multi-track year-round schools in the state, Massengill did not have a blueprint to follow for opening the new school. So, in February, she went to a national conference and tried to learn as much as she could before it was time to open for the year.
"I went to every session I could go to, sat on the floor and wrote as hard as I could write. I didn't know how you switched classes with people. I didn't know how six classes of teachers used five rooms. I didn't know how you did schedules - how did you schedule school pictures when everybody isn't there at one time? It was a wild time. But somehow we did it, and it was very successful."
After the success at Morrisville, Massengill said the parents went to the board and pushed for a year-round middle school. The next year, the board decided to make the new elementary and middle schools being built at West Lake year-round schools. Durant Road elementary and middle schools also became year-round programs.
Massengill said the system originally proposed converting West Cary Middle School to a year-round program so that the students from Morrisville could feed there. However, the community rejected that idea.
"After that experience, we got to the point where year-round schools were being placed in new buildings," she said. "Because of where they were located, the populations were not as diverse as the rest of our schools."
As a result Massengill said she stepped up her recruiting efforts and started going to African-American churches on Sunday mornings to talk about year-round schools. Massengill said it took a while, but the system was eventually successful in increasing the minority percentages in the year-round programs.
In 1996, instead of continuing to place year-round programs only in new schools, the board decided to turn Green Elementary into a year-round program. Massengill was selected as Green's principal and charged with overseeing the district's first conversion of a traditional school to a year-round program.
"It was the first conversion and one that has been very successful," she said. "Things at Green had not been going well. Lots of families were moving out and choosing magnet schools, so we didn't get the same kind of resistance that we did at West Cary where everything was going fine."
Massengill Becomes Director of Magnet Program
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Caroline Massengill is now Senior
Director of the Magnet Program
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A year and a half later in 1997, Massengill became director of magnet programs for the school system. She said during her tenure as director, she believes a lot of good things have happened within the magnet program. Some of those accomplishments include opening the magnet resource center as a place where anyone moving to Wake County can go to find out about magnet schools; building and opening Southeast Raleigh High in 1997 as an accelerated studies magnet high school in southeast Raleigh; and opening Centennial Campus Middle School.
"That one was 10 years in the works," she said. "For that school to be located on the campus of N.C. State University and the cooperative agreement between a public school system and a major university was quite an accomplishment. It's now starting its second year, and we have just tons of applicants for that school."
Massengill said since it's inception in 1977, the magnet program has grown to 43 magnet schools. She said the program is now at a point where instead of continuing to expand, the program needs to improve upon what it already has in place.
"What we're doing now is trying to categorize the magnet programs to make them more understandable for the parents," she said. "We are at the point now, that we need to take a total relook at the magnet program and decide which ones are working, which ones we need to eliminate, and which ones we should replicate."
Courageous School Board Credited with Creating Choices
Massengill credits much of the magnet program's success and the choices that have been created for parents and students to a courageous school board.
"I think it's taken a very courageous school board to do some of the things it's done over the years," she said. "Courageous to start the magnet program and to take a chance on year-round schools. But right now, I think it's taken a courageous school board to build schools in downtown Raleigh and to rely on the magnet program to ensure that there are children in those schools. As magnet programs have offered unique opportunities for children in the district, then traditional schools have said 'hey, let's do that here.' So it forces us as magnets to raise the bar. I think that has a lot to do with why we are such a highly effective school district. We have a community that demands a high level of opportunity for their children and one that demands choice."