School district plans to convert special-needs school into ‘migrant resettlement’ facility, county commissioner warns

A school district in North Carolina plans to shut down a special-needs school to convert it into a “newcomers school,” New Hanover County Commissioner Dane Scalise warned Thursday.

New Hanover County Schools announced in November that the district plans to shutter the Career Readiness Academy at Mosley, which serves students with special needs.

According to Scalise, during a meeting last week, the NHC Board of Education and NHC Schools Superintendent Dr. Charles Foust stated that the shuttered school might be replaced with a “newcomers school.” Scalise explained that, despite the misleading name, the school would ultimately amount to a migrant resettlement facility. He slammed the district for attempting to close down the school, forcing its students to relocate to other facilities in the county.

“Mosley is a one-of-a-kind public school in New Hanover County that offers custom-tailored education to local students who require special learning. Newcomers schools may be called schools, but they are more akin to migrant resettlement and assimilation facilities,” Scalise wrote in a recent op-ed published by the Carolina Journal.

“The purported mission of these facilities is not to educate students in the traditional sense but to allegedly help entire immigrant and refugee families integrate into the local community where they are relocated,” Scalise continued. “The undeniable truth is that a newcomers school is outside the purview of our education system and would rapidly become a magnet to migrant families from outside of the county.”

He called on the district to focus its priorities on serving students who live in the county. Scalise noted that another North Carolina school district, Guilford County Schools, formed newcomer institutions and experienced “a rapid influx of immigration,” turning it into a “hub for refugee resettlement,” according to an October WUNC article.

“I now have serious questions about how long any plans to close Mosley and open a newcomers school have been in the works, especially after hearing Dr. Foust’s staff disclose that this plan has been on the table since as early as 2021,” Scalise added. “I am also gravely concerned that Dr. Foust and his administration unilaterally decided to announce the closure of Mosley without seeking the Board of Education’s prior approval. Discussions and decisions of this magnitude should be had and made by our elected Board of Education, not by staff behind closed doors.”

Foust did not respond to a request for comment, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

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