The once-segregated Union Central Elementary School long struggled to shake its identity as the “Black school” here—even though at least half its students have been white for decades.
Three years ago, the school was in a downward spiral of sputtering academic achievement and plummeting enrollment. The Caldwell Parish School District’s other two elementaries strained to absorb Union Central students taking advantage of a state law that allows children at floundering schools to transfer to better-performing ones.
Superintendent Nicki McCann had a vision for addressing the problem—an approach so risky her husband predicted it would cost her the dream job she’d worked toward for years.
To pull it off, McCann would have to navigate parents’ unease about logistics and student safety.
She would have to confront deep-seated feelings around race and class and the scars left by desegregation.
But McCann is not easily daunted. Her resolute optimism once prompted her team to gift her with rainbow-and-unicorn-themed knickknacks that she now displays in a “shrine” in her office.
For McCann, Union Central’s plight was personal. Plenty of white people who grew up well-off in the parish—as McCann did—have never driven down the road pockmarked with rusted trailers and housing projects that leads to the school.
McCann was an exception. She started her career teaching kindergarten at Union Central and served as its principal, from 2005 to 2014. She sent her own children there, even though they were zoned for another school.
As McCann contemplated the district’s increasingly dire challenges—cramped classrooms at Columbia and Grayson elementaries, half empty ones at Union Central—the answer seemed clear.
McCann wanted to transform Caldwell’s elementaries into “center schools,” sometimes called merged, paired, or cluster schools: campuses serving a limited number of grades and that draw students from a broader geographic area than typical K-5 schools.
In her vision, the three elementaries would become K-1, 2-3, and 4-5 campuses, educating all the district’s students, just as its pre-kindergarten, junior high, and high school already did.
The strategy was popular during the 1960s and 1970s desegregation era, then faded. Interest seems to have resurged recently as school districts strive to better balance racial and socioeconomic demographics.
Combining schools is a fraught prospect. Similar attempts in Richmond, Va., suburban Illinois, and Washington, D.C., ran aground in recent years.
Politically and historically, those places may seem like more fertile ground for an equity play than Caldwell.
The district had a Black and white senior king and queen until the early 2000s. And Caldwell is about as politically and socially conservative as it comes: President Donald Trump garnered about 86% of the vote in 2024.
But McCann believed the Caldwell community is proud of its school system, the largest employer in town. People care about their neighbors and could rally around a restructuring if they thought it would help all students succeed.
McCann maintained that faith even though she’d already watched the idea flop.
One of her predecessors, Karla Tollett, floated so-called center schools about a decade earlier, after seeing the approach in the state’s highest-performing system at the time: Zachary Community Schools near Baton Rouge.
Tollett quickly ran into pushback. The district dropped the idea.
But McCann would not let it go.
The prospect of center schools first surfaced around 2012, when McCann was Union Central’s principal. She believed it would benefit her students the most.
Having a half dozen classrooms per grade would allow schools to more easily separate kids who brought neighborhood tension or fights to class with them.
Students from Union Central’s housing projects wouldn’t feel as much pressure to seem tough in front of kids from their area. They could allow themselves to pay attention, engage, or in McCann’s words, to “be their own person.”
Superintendent rallies her ‘army’ of teachers
Through the early months of 2023, McCann and her team pitched the positives of the center school strategy, including smaller class sizes at the district’s two overflowing elementaries: Grayson, which served the rural, southern part of the district, and Columbia, just steps away from the historic downtown of the parish’s seat, a town of about 300 people.
As questions poured in from parents and school staff, McCann and her team addressed them clearly. They met with parents in their offices, shared their phone numbers, listened in public meetings as some parents threatened to leave the district.
Just as crucially: Before bringing the idea to the broader community, McCann reached out first to the principals of all three schools for their support. They helped get elementary teachers on board. Many teachers, in turn, became ambassadors for the proposal, fielding questions from anxious parents, imploring board members to enact it.
“Nicki is the kind of person who is going to persist,” said Mary Wiley, Caldwell’s director of federal programs and one of its few Black district leaders. Wiley served as principal of Union Central before McCann and hired her to teach fresh out of college. “She believed so wholeheartedly in this. She had the backing of all her people, her army. She was out front, and we were all pushing from behind.”
Educators’ advocacy propelled center schools over the finish line, McCann and the narrow majority of school board members who supported the proposal said.
Still, the plan failed to win the backing of Baron Glass, the lone Black member of the board. His opposition was rooted in part in the decades-old wounds left by the district’s initial desegregation effort back in the early 1970s.
Two years in, the Caldwell community is slowly embracing the change. Some families remain dissatisfied or left for neighboring schools or homeschooling, costing the district about 15 to 20 students overall.
But many teachers consider the shift a vast improvement.
And the community is beginning to see the promised advantages. Class sizes have reached about 18 to 19 students across all elementary schools, as opposed to the 25 or 26 at Caldwell’s most crowded schools before the restructure.
Student achievement lagged a bit initially, then surged. Two years into the new model, Caldwell became Louisiana’s most improved district in progressing students at all grade levels and subjects to “mastery” level on the state assessment.
This past school year’s 6th graders, the first to go through 5th grade as a combined cohort, arrived at Caldwell Parish Junior High more academically and socially in sync than any before them, the school’s teachers and leaders say.
“This is the best group of 6th graders we’ve ever had,” said Jordan Laffoon, the lead teacher who has been at the school for about a decade and is white.
Convincing district staff to take a risk
McCann got her first lesson on how not to seek buy-in as a leader in her teens, when her teammates chaffed at her top-down approach to captaining the Caldwell Parish High School drill team. (For years afterward, she’d hear: “Oh, we hated you when you were our drill team captain, but man, we looked good.”)
She first broached the idea of revisiting center schools to district leaders overseeing early childhood, elementary, secondary, and special education, and Randy Rentz, the school board member involved in a long-term planning process.
They examined wide gulfs in elementary enrollment between Columbia and Grayson on the one hand and Union Central on the other, and agreed it was worth a try.
A while later, she spoke with all three elementary principals, who immediately jumped on board.
It wasn’t a hard sell, given the challenges school leaders were dealing with. Grayson’s enrollment had surged so high, Principal Delinda Smith put a class in a copier room.
But Smith, who grew up in Caldwell, had another reason for backing the proposal.
Decades earlier, she’d attended Columbia Elementary, often shorthanded as the district’s “rich, white school” even though, by 2023, two-thirds of its students lived in poverty.
It was a shock for Smith to enter junior high school and be in classes with more than a small handful of Black children for the first time, she said.
“I’ll be transparent. I was never around students of color [much] before, and they kind of frightened me,” Smith said. “It was nothing that they did or anything like that.” Looking back, that reaction doesn’t seem good for anyone—herself or her Black classmates, Smith said.
Addressing rising anxiety about behavior problems
Next came a larger, crucial audience: Teachers, bus drivers, and other school staff.
McCann promised teachers more opportunities for collaboration. Most elementary schools had only two classes per grade, in part because of staffing limits and facility size. Since upper elementary teachers split up core subjects, a 3rd-grade language arts teacher might have no one to bounce ideas off. That could be particularly tough on a newbie.
Special Ķvlog and coaches would be able to focus on just a couple of grades, instead of mastering K-5 content.
The move would free up resources to add art and music classes to each school, giving teachers 90 minutes a day of planning time instead of an hour.
“That was a big selling point,” McCann recalled.
Teachers would have a major say in where they’d end up working, McCann pledged.
Some were on board from the beginning, including Ericka Williamson, Grayson’s literacy integrationist. She felt she’d be a stronger coach if she could concentrate just on kindergarten and 1st grade, where her expertise is deepest.
Williamson, who has two daughters in the district, attended “mostly white” schools growing up and didn’t make friends of other races until she got to college. She wanted a different experience for her girls.
But other teachers with children in the district worried about how the restructuring would impact their work—and their own kids’ ability to learn.
“I was not for it. I was very honest about not being on board,” said Dallas Abrams, who taught 1st grade at Columbia before the restructuring.
Abrams was wary of the behavior issues she’d heard about at Union Central, both for herself as a teacher—“I’d never dealt with that,” she said—and for her daughter, Clara, then a 4th grader at Columbia.
Abrams remembers feeling that “all the things they’re saying could be beneficial about having center schools do not outweigh rocking everyone in the parish’s world to do this.”
Sharing ‘hard truths’ about the problem
In February of 2023, with about two months to go before the school board was slated to consider the proposal, McCann stood on the stage of Caldwell Parish High’s auditorium during a community meeting. The room buzzed with the prospect of the merger, word of which had spread on social media.
(Education Week later watched the meeting on YouTube, and interviewed attendees to better understand the atmosphere.)
McCann recognized almost every face in the crowd. She’d seen them for years at the local Dixie Youth Ballpark, taught their kids.
McCann launched into what she called the “hard truths”: untenable crowding at Columbia and Grayson, five elementary positions across all three schools filled by a substitute, paraprofessional, or not covered at all.
She spoke at length about the advantages she’d already shared with teachers: more collaboration, leading to stronger instruction. New art and music classes.
She added enticements for parents: Students could go to school with friends from a local sports league or church. Schools serving older kids could expand or add clubs and enrichment activities, such as 4H (an agriculture program) and Junior BETA (leadership and character development).
McCann acknowledged hurdles: Transportation logistics would need to be worked out, though the two furthest schools were just several miles apart. Sports would need to be rethought.
Near the end of her presentation, McCann spoke about how center schools could create greater “unity” across the parish.
She was brief—but explicit—in describing how more racially and socioeconomically integrated elementary schools could benefit all kids.
“Growing up together, with diversity as part of everyone’s life contributes to unity, understanding, and acceptance of others,” McCann told the audience. “I’m talking about race. I’m talking about socioeconomic level. I’m talking about students with disabilities. [This] allows them to acclimate to social norms together as a group. And that’s probably the most beautiful thing about this plan, in my mind.”
Staying calm while listening to intense, emotional criticism
After she finished speaking, parents’ concerns poured out.
One mother worried about sending her children to a school surrounded by housing projects.
“You’re putting them where there was a stabbing last night,” she said. “I’m a mama. I’m scared.”
Another bought her home so that her “child could go to a certain school, and now there’s the chance that she will be moved to this ‘D’ school,” she said, referring to Union Central’s accountability rating on the state’s A through F scale. “So how is that justified?”
“Very good question,” McCann answered. “I don’t want there to be this mindset that Central teachers are ‘D’ teachers, and Central kids are ‘D’ kids.”
In fact, Union Central received an ‘A’ for student growth the previous year—an indicator of strong teaching. But a Louisiana law first passed in 2014—and updated in 2018 to require schools to better publicize the option—allowed any student who could provide their own transportation to leave a school rated ‘D’ or below. Union Central lost nearly every child from a family with the means to act on that option, making it almost impossible for the school to climb out of its low-performing status.
Others were angry about the lack of specifics.
“What I hear today is a logistical nightmare for parents,” one father said. “We are not opposed to change. What we don’t like is forced change.”
McCann kept her voice even, her face neutral, knowing people were watching closely.
She promised to incorporate the community’s feedback into a “full plan,” which she’d share before the April board vote—a pledge she delivered on in a second public meeting.
“I’m not going to put something out there that’s going to fail,” McCann said at the initial rollout. “We’re going to bend over backwards to make this work.”
Teachers and school staff piped up in support.
One recalled her early career struggles and explained how the proposal would give newer teachers needed mentoring. Another pointed out the new structure would end the need for kindergarteners and 5th graders to share bathrooms unsupervised.
Why Union Central teachers initially felt demoralized
The next day was a tough one at Union Central. It was hard for teachers to hear in such stark terms how their community felt about the school, at which Black students made up just under half the population and where 90 percent of students lived in poverty.
After dismissal, staff decamped to a nearby Sonic to commiserate over slushies.
“I cried. I cried a lot. It hurt really bad because I knew how much we poured into these kids,” said Casey Carroll, a Union Central teacher, who is white. She thought of the hours she’d logged, away from her own four children, planning lessons, creating instructional materials, only to be told that she and her colleagues “were not valued, were bad teachers, that we were this horrific school, and that our kids were the bad kids.”
Race felt like the subtext for a lot of the comments, though it rarely came up explicitly in public discussion.
“Everybody wanted to tiptoe around it. They didn’t want to say it. But it was very obvious what they meant,” said Lana Gregory, Union Central’s principal, who is white.
As the community wrestled with the proposal, teachers continued to field parents’ questions and tout their support. Wiley showed up at the feed store where Gary Cassels, her board representative, worked to lobby him personally.
In a district where school board members pray before each meeting and where it isn’t unusual to see a cross on the wall of an office, some invoked their shared faith.
“I know so many of us in this community are believers in Christ,” Williamson wrote in a letter to all seven board members advocating for the proposal. “As believers … we are to do what is best for ALL the children in this parish and not just our own out of convenience and comfort.”
Learning important lessons from a Black school board member
Glass, the board member who represented the area around Union Central, held a meeting in his district, mostly attended by opponents of the plan. He invited McCann, who he recalls he saw as the “uppity” blonde-haired, blue-eyed, daughter of a prominent local attorney.
Glass was impressed when she showed up and seemed to listen.
For her part, McCann didn’t understand why Glass or anyone else from the Union Central community was against the proposal. After all, some Black families from the school spoke publicly in favor of the plan at the initial community meeting.
McCann had worked at Union Central for nearly two decades, as a teacher and leader. She will proudly point out a plaque on the building commemorating a renovation that lists her as principal.
She’d worked hard to help make Union Central, for a time, the highest-performing elementary school in the district. She believed she’d proven, over and over, that she loved the school and its students. She thought the community trusted her to have their children’s best interest at heart.
McCann knows the rainbows-and-unicorn teasing has a darker edge, that some think she doesn’t always acknowledge the tough stuff.
She looked around the roomful of people nodding at Glass’ criticisms of the plan, and wondered what she was missing.
McCann’s optimism was tested as the vote drew near.
“I was in a very down place in my head because it was such a massive decision,” she recalled later.
Each morning, McCann wakes up at half past five to do a Bible app devotional. Throughout that spring, many of the passages centered on Queen Esther, who risked her life to save her people.
McCann turned to the Old Testament heroine as a biblical role model. Esther risked her life to save her community. McCann was putting her dream job on the line for the good of hers.
McCann knows that “small towns die.” She doesn’t want that to happen to Caldwell. She wants her kids and their children to spend their lives there.
She believes excellent schools for all kids are critical to the parish’s survival.
She told herself: “Don’t be scared to do what you know is right and what you feel like God has called you to do.”
A tense board vote and a pledge to move forward
On April 20, 2023, the seven-member Caldwell Parish school board voted 4-3 to approve the restructuring.
Bo Barton, who represents the predominately white area that includes Columbia Elementary, said four teachers from the school called just that afternoon urging him to reject the plan.
Quality teachers and bus drivers would leave the district, Barton predicted. The highest-performing students would opt for private schools or homeschooling. Test scores would plummet.
He acknowledged the proposal had the votes. But he wanted his concerns on the record.
“When this passes four to three tonight, that is [about] the same ratio, as to what this parish” thinks of the restructuring, Barton said.
Perhaps no one spoke out more strongly against the plan than Glass. He called restructuring “the worst” idea he’d heard in his more than three decades on the board.
The district would lose school choice for families, he said. Worse: It might lose students.
Glass referenced a grandmother who claimed she had dozens of students interested in joining a homeschool collective if the proposal passed. Even if the number was much lower—say, 10—it could cost the district thousands of dollars, Glass argued.
Plenty of teachers opposed the idea too, but feared speaking out “because they are 100% afraid of retaliation, loss of employment or somebody mistreating them,” Glass said.
Still, Ķvlog’ advocacy had clearly influenced the board. All four members who supported the plan referenced their calls and messages championing the proposal.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I know more about education than professional Ķvlog,” Rentz, a school board member who’d come out early in support of center schools. He stood by the idea, even as constituents called, threatening to vote him out.
After the final vote, all seven members—even the proposal’s opponents—pledged to make the new structure a success.
So did McCann.
“If there are parents or if there are teachers who are concerned, we are going to bust our tails to bridge those relationships because we want this to be the very best it can be,” she said.
Early the next morning, McCann took a moment to savor the realization of the dream she’d held for her district for over a decade.
She texted a local news story on the restructuring to Tollett, her mentor and the superintendent who first floated center schools: “We did it!!” she wrote. “Time to roll up our sleeves!”
One of the toughest next steps: splitting up close-knit staff. Though most teachers ultimately wound up where they wanted to be, some were disappointed—or even cried—when they got their placements.
To ease the disruption, school leaders spent the summer before the mergers building staff and community cohesion.
Grayson Elementary organized a water slide party for families and teachers. Union Central hosted a bowling night and carnival. Gregory, the school’s principal, threw a crawfish boil at her house. And she set up a huge charcuterie board in the auditorium and invited teachers to spend the night.
During the sleepover, two teachers brainstormed a new writing process, jumping up to jot down details in the early morning hours, Gregory said.
The three principals huddled for hours to craft class lists. They wanted to ensure that all students had someone in their class who they were friendly with, and who looked like them.
The painful side of integration for Caldwell’s Black community
Nearly two years after the restructuring plan launched, Glass sat with McCann in his office at the courthouse in downtown Columbia, recalling the debate, what he left unsaid.
Glass, the first Black man to serve as president of Caldwell’s school board, directs Families in Need of Service, an intervention and crime prevention program for youth who have come into contact with the parish’s court system.
He has a plastic shield around his desk—installed during the pandemic—that he’s decorated with stickers designed to soothe families through difficult moments: “It’s okay.” “Calm.” “Breath.”
Glass dresses formally, usually sporting a bowtie. He has close friends who “don’t look like me.” But his experience of Caldwell has never really matched theirs.
Around 1985, he was heading home from a concert when he saw people in Ku Klux Klan garb.
Glass was among the first Black students to integrate Columbia Elementary, attending kindergarten there more than 50 years ago. He says he got the education he needed, though one especially cruel teacher stood out.
An incident in that classroom reverberates for him, even decades later. He declined to share details, but said: “If it had not been for the love that I got at home, she would have destroyed me.”
Around 2009, Glass gave the keynote address at a reunion for those who attended Union Central when it was a K-12, segregated school. In preparation, he asked alumni: Had integration had a positive or negative impact on their lives?
“Over 90 percent of them said it was a bad thing,” Glass recalled. “They left schools where people loved them, cherished them, were from their community” to be taught instead by, “individuals who didn’t care about them, didn’t like them, didn’t know anything about them.”
Glass worried restructuring could force Union Central students through the same ordeal.
“They’re not my babies,” he said. “But I come from that area. I couldn’t put them in the fire pit without a fight.”
It wasn’t an argument he thought his fellow school board members—all white—would find persuasive. So, Glass stuck to hard facts: the loss of school choice, the possibility students would leave the district.
As McCann listened to Glass share his community’s experiences with integration, she finally grasped why he and some other Black families had been so wary of center schools.
Glass has hit the school board’s term limits—enacted long after he was elected in 1993—and will be stepping down by 2026.
Years ago, Glass told his daughter—now nearing the end of nursing school—that she’d have to leave Caldwell to reach her professional potential. He doesn’t believe that there’s much opportunity here for ambitious, educated Black young people.
In his mind, the jury is out on whether center schools are a step towards changing that dynamic.
But tossing the whole structure is not a direction he’d support, not at this point. It would just cause chaos for students.
“I think it’s advantageous now to just move forward,” Glass said.
Arts and collaboration take center stage
Two years after the restructuring, the impact of the change was on full display in preparations for Caldwell’s second annual arts festival.
Teachers listened to instrumental versions of pop songs popularized by the television show Bridgerton as they hung student artwork at the Schepis Museum in downtown Columbia.
The mountains, frogs, and snow globes hand-drawn by students at Grayson, Columbia, and Union Central might not have existed without the art classes now offered at every elementary campus—classes made possible by restructuring.
Art and music were technically on school schedules before the change. But classroom teachers were expected to deliver that content. Many didn’t have the expertise and the subjects got shortchanged, McCann said.
The center schools approach is not universally loved. Some parents still complain about the hassle, the longer bus rides.
But the festival is just one example of the good that’s come from the change.
The district has started formal common planning at all three schools for teachers at the same grade level. Caldwell attempted that virtually in the past, but it wasn’t nearly as successful.
Having double or triple the number of teachers leading certain grades and subjects offers exponentially more opportunities for informal “hallway PD,” teachers at all three schools said. Flexibility to separate students who don’t mix well has smoothed behavior management.
And there are advantages to leading a school geared toward only two grade levels.
Back when Grayson was a K-5 school, Smith, the principal and her staff, planned field trips for every grade level, conjured up school-wide activities that would both work for 5-year-olds and excite 11-year-olds. Teachers had to keep the littlest students quiet when 3rd through 5th graders took state standardized tests.
Now Smith can concentrate on what works best for kindergartners and 1st graders. Grayson has an Easter Egg hunt and a Christmas concert. When Williamson, Grayson’s literacy coach, hosts a wedding for the letters “Q” and “U”, every kindergartner in the district can attend.
Union Central, meanwhile, holds a variety show, tough to pull off with early elementary kids.
The idea is to give kids something to look forward to as they move through the system, McCann said.
Middle school sees benefits from the change
Perhaps no group of Ķvlog can attest to the power of the new structure as much as the staff of Caldwell Parish Junior High, which all three elementaries feed into.
The beginning of 6th grade used to feel like a chaotic “melting pot” as students from different elementaries converged, Katie Hillestad, the school’s principal, said.
This school year, as the first 6th graders to be together as 5th graders came in, experienced teachers “noticed an immediate difference,” said Hillestad, who is white. “The kids were ready to learn. They already knew each other.”
Sixth-grade in-school suspensions are down more than 50 percent over last school year. Discipline referrals have fallen by more than a third.
What’s more, since all the students came from Union Central’s new 4-5 school, they were more likely to be on the same page as far as content and skills.
“They’re all getting the same instruction,” Hillestad said. “All their teachers go to the same common planning time, and they’re all working together.”
Teachers have also noticed more social mixing this year, including interracially. More white and Black children go to each other’s birthday parties. Parents’ social media posts show kids from different elementaries at the movies or mall together in nearby Monroe.
Lamaria Tatum, who recently finished 6th grade, attended Union Central throughout elementary school. She remembers feeling nervous about new kids coming in to the school.
When teachers first explained the shift, “our whole class did not like it,” said Lamaria, who is Black. That changed once the new students arrived. The transition to junior high, though still scary, was easier because “I basically knew all the people” already, she said.
To be sure, it isn’t all racial harmony. This spring, a white child at Columbia called a Black classmate a “monkey.”
Principal Melisa Gillpatrick explained how hurtful that could be. “Sometimes we hear things at home, or we hear things outside of school” that might be unkind, and we should think carefully before repeating them, she said.
That wouldn’t have happened at Columbia a few years ago because “we really didn’t have any Black children here,” Gillpatrick said. She believes the “younger, spongy” elementary years are a better time for kids to learn to respect differences than their tumultuous tweens.
Initially, test scores ticked downward at Columbia, bringing both that school and Grayson down to a ‘D.’ That’s in part because the schools could no longer get credit for student growth, district leaders said.
But that so-called “implementation dip” may be over. In the 2024-25 school year, test scores rose nearly across the board. Caldwell was named the “most improved” district in the state when it comes to growing students to the “mastery” level on state tests.
McCann credits the progress to increased teacher collaboration and the ability of coaches and special education teachers to focus more tightly on grade-level content.
The transition went smoother than expected, said Abrams, who switched to teaching 2nd grade to stay at Columbia.
“I love my new co-workers. I love having the other five teachers” to collaborate with, Abrams said. “They became like family.”
Her daughter, Clara, thrived in 5th grade at Union Central, giving a speech at the end of the year about how glad she was that the district had restructured. But she also witnessed her first fight soon after the transition, upsetting Abrams.
Abrams attended Columbia growing up. She still misses the feel of a community school.
“I’m good with it. I’m OK with it,” she said of the center schools. “I just liked it the other way.”
Making the best of a difficult situation
Cassels, who is white, stands by his vote against restructuring. Parents tell him that having elementary-age kids at three different schools is a “hardship,” he said. Buses are on the road longer, raising the potential for accidents, hiking fuel costs.
Still, he added, “It’s better than I thought it was gonna be. Most people have learned to live with it.”
Center schools passed a test of political support last year when Cassels—and the rest of the school board—voted unanimously to renew McCann’s contract for four more years.
And surveys of parents’ satisfaction with the district, conducted after this school year, were mostly positive, McCann said. They rarely mentioned restructuring.
McCann keeps a favorite reminder of the positive power of center schools in her office, next to her rainbows and unicorn shrine: A book, written by the first cohort of 4th graders to attend Union Central together, about their experience of restructuring.
In short essays, students said they were initially scared to leave their old schools. They would miss younger siblings. They didn’t want to meet new people.
But then they created great memories: eating blue cookies, playing capture the flag, reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians for language arts. Many listed the names of new friends.
Now incoming 6th grader Carson Andrews’ conclusion is typical: “If it weren’t for this school change, I wouldn’t have had this much fun.”
