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Union County School Board Votes To Reassign 4,000 Students

The Union County school board voted Tuesday night to assign about 4,000 students to different schools next year. That reverses some of the changes the board made as part of another big reassignment in 2014. Board members say too many schools are now underutilized and they want more students to go to schools closer to home. 

During Tuesday's board meeting, several parents complained that the new plan doesn’t go far enough in bringing students back to their neighborhood schools and still splits some communities.

Board member Candice Sturdivant cast the lone vote against the plan. She said the process was rushed.

"We have not thought about how our students will transition. Do we have people in place to have those conversations with our students as they transition into another school? We just did a realignment three years ago and I’m hoping we do not revisit this conversation again three years later.

In 2014, about 6,000 students were re-assigned. Many parents were upset because some students were sent to schools that required longer bus rides.

Gwendolyn is an award-winning journalist who has covered a broad range of stories on the local and national levels. Her experience includes producing on-air reports for National Public Radio and she worked full-time as a producer for NPR’s All Things Considered news program for five years. She worked for several years as an on-air contract reporter for CNN in Atlanta and worked in print as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun Media Group, The Washington Post and covered Congress and various federal agencies for the Daily Environment Report and Real Estate Finance Today. Glenn has won awards for her reports from the Maryland-DC-Delaware Press Association, SNA and the first-place radio award from the National Association of Black Journalists.