For many families, the last day of school before summer break is marked by feelings of joy and accomplishment, a time to check off another milestone in their children’s educational journey. But at East Arcadia School in Bladen County, sadness and frustration loomed over the final day of classes on June 4.
Students won’t return to the school this fall. The Bladen County school board voted 5-4 in March to close it and send most of the 59 students to Clarkton School of Discovery 24 miles away. Board members cited declining enrollment and a $2 million price tag for needed repairs as reasons to close. Bladen County Schools Superintendent Jason Atkinson said the school also faced significant staffing challenges. It did not have full-time employees for children with special needs, the school principal also drove a bus, and administrators struggled to hire a guidance counselor.
Parents pleaded with board members to upgrade the school and keep it open. Some said their children will have less time to sleep and do homework because of long bus rides. They also said the school served as a crucial hub in East Arcadia, where about 85% of residents are Black, for a century.
Despite their heartbreak, the community wanted the last day of school to be fun for students. They rented a bounce house, played music, and brought snacks. Fourth-graders walked across the stage to celebrate their graduation a year early as the crowd cheered them on.
“We were just giving them a good send-off so they could always remember that East Arcadia was their school,” said Town Council member Fannie Long.
East Arcadia School is among 16 traditional public schools in North Carolina that closed this year. Eleven of them had majority-Black student populations, according to figures from the N.C. Department of Public Instruction and an analysis by The Assembly. Parents and education advocates in some of the schools say their districts have neglected facilities that serve high numbers of non-white and low-income students.
Public schools across the state are seeing declining enrollment as more families opt for charter, private, and home schools. Declining birth rates are also a factor. Since the state largely funds public schools on a per-student basis, many districts have closed schools to cut costs.
North Carolina’s investment in charter and private schools has left traditional public schools vulnerable to closure—especially those in poor communities, said Ayesha K. Hashim, a research scientist for the Northwest Evaluation Association, which tracks K-12 education trends across the country.
“Inevitably, a number of their schools will be called to close, meaning it’s going to impact Black and brown or poor kids more,” said Hashim, who is based in Chapel Hill. “And the ramifications of this mean some of the children who could contribute to the state’s economy and grow as people in their school systems won’t have the same access to do so.”
Closing Black schools is not new. About 73% of the state’s 184 traditional public schools that closed across the state between 2011 and 2025 “disproportionately impacted students of color,” according to a report released last year by the North Carolina Justice Center.
The trend extends beyond North Carolina. Majority-Black schools, which account for about 10% of public schools across the country, were three times more likely than predominantly white schools to close between 2000 and 2018, according to a study by the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. Sometimes local leaders point to low academic performance when considering which schools to close. But majority-Black schools on par academically with majority-white schools were still 25% more likely to close, the Stanford researchers found.
At East Arcadia School this past year, about 47% of students were Black and 27% were Hispanic. Bladen County school board chairman Mackie Singletary said East Arcadia School’s closure had nothing to do with race. “It’s about making the right decision for the county and the faculty and students,” he said. “Every child is important, every faculty member is important.”
The three Black board members voted against closing the school.
“We owe each student at East Arcadia an apology, because we position other schools to accelerate academically while we’ve deprived them of some of the essentials that other schools have,” board member Anthony Thomas told his colleagues in March. “We’re expecting first-class results from students and from parents when we’re giving them second-class access to materials and things that they would need to be successful.”
‘For Us to Be Proud’
Formerly enslaved people founded what became the town of East Arcadia after the Civil War, said Earnestine Keaton, director of the Lower Bladen Columbus Historical Society. The families that lived there grew corn and tobacco and raised livestock.
“It was like building a community that was a continuation of the slave community, but without white people—with Black people knowing how to conduct business and what their value was in terms of their labor,” said Keaton, 77.
East Arcadia School opened in the 1920s as a Rosenwald school, one of thousands across the country and three in Bladen County that educated Black students during the Jim Crow era. It was located at the current site of town hall until the 1950s, when it moved to the existing campus on N.C. 87.
The building wasn’t fancy, said Keaton, who attended in the 1950s and ’60s. Each grade level had one teacher who taught from textbooks that were handed down from white schools. Keaton recalls looking at the long list of student names written inside the cover.
“My mother used to say things like ‘Well, we have what we have, and they have what they have,’” Keaton said. “It was for us to be proud of what we had.”
The school originally served students in kindergarten through 12th grade. But shortly after Bladen County Schools integrated in the early 1970s, officials eliminated the high school grades at East Arcadia School. Angry and frustrated that only the lower grades remained, residents wanted more control of their community. They successfully lobbied the General Assembly to pass legislation in 1973 that allowed East Arcadia to incorporate as a town in order to have more autonomy over how the community and school might change.
Like many Black schools across the country, East Arcadia School didn’t get an immediate boost after integration. The school still didn’t have a gymnasium by the 1970s, forcing students to travel to Elizabethtown for sports practices. So community member Berline Graham raised money from individuals and businesses to build a gym behind the school. The facility, which now serves as a multipurpose room, bears her name.
But over the years, East Arcadia School fell into disrepair. The district eliminated the school’s middle grades in 2018, sending those students to schools in Clarkton and Elizabethtown.
“We’re expecting first-class results from students and from parents when we’re giving them second-class access to materials and things that they would need to be successful.”
Anthony Thomas, Bladen County school board member
Former students blame Bladen County Schools for not keeping up with the school’s maintenance needs. “I have not seen a change to that building since I graduated from elementary school 35 years ago,” said East Arcadia Town Council member Rhonda Hall.
Ronald Coley, who served as principal at East Arcadia School from 2009 to 2014, said the school spent eight months toward the end of his tenure fine-tuning a state grant application for $2.5 million to create a reading program and supply iPads for students. But Coley said school board members worried the additional resources would lure families away from Clarkton School of Discovery. The school submitted the application, he said, but didn’t get the money.
Coley, who had come to Bladen County Schools from Asheboro, left the school a year later. “I told the principal who they hired after me, ‘This is where principals come to die.’”
But Coley remained at Bladen County Schools, becoming the principal of Booker T. Washington Primary School, another majority-Black school, in 2014. The school board voted to close that school in two years later as part of a broader consolidation. Coley then retired.
Urban Schools Not Immune
Bladen County Schools lost more than 800 students between 2015-16 and 2025-26, a drop of 18%. The county’s population fell 11% during that time.
Meanwhile, local charter schools have seen a boost in enrollment. Emereau: Bladen, in the county seat of Elizabethtown, serves about 670 students—more than double the number it had in 2018, according to the N.C. Department of Public Instruction. The Paul R. Brown Leadership Academy in Elizabethtown also doubled its enrollment since 2016.
Bladen County, tucked in the southeastern corner of the state, features small communities and flat farmland that grows blueberries and other crops. Statewide, most of the schools that closed this year are in rural counties, including Craven, Beaufort, and Martin. But a handful are in urban and suburban counties such as Cumberland, home to Fayetteville.
“It is simply because the school board failed to maintain their schools while investing in other communities.”
Kia Anthony, Spring Lake mayor
Cumberland County Schools, the state’s fifth-largest school district, has lost roughly 1,200 students over the past year, accounting for nearly 2.7% of the student population. The local school board voted in May to close Manchester Elementary School in Spring Lake and J.W. Coon Elementary School in Fayetteville, citing enrollment changes and aging infrastructure. Officials have said there are $800 million in deferred maintenance needs across the district.
About 45% of students in Cumberland County Schools are Black. The figures were slightly higher for Manchester Elementary, where nearly 53% of students last school year were Black, and J.W. Coon Elementary, where Black students accounted for nearly 48% of the student population.
Spring Lake Mayor Kia Anthony said the Manchester closure reflects what she described as a “pattern of neglect,” arguing the district allowed schools to deteriorate before citing their condition as justification for closing them.
The district closed the town’s only other primary school, Lillian Black Elementary, where 54% of students were Black in 2022. More than a decade earlier, it closed Mae Rudd Williams School, a specialized school serving students with disabilities and mental health needs that also served a predominantly Black student population.
“It is simply because the school board failed to maintain their schools while investing in other communities,” Anthony said. “And here we are again, closing a third school in Spring Lake for the exact same reason.”
Manchester Elementary largely served Fort Bragg military families, low-income residents, and generations of students who saw the school as an extension of home, Anthony said.
“The schools that they chose to close are in some of the most impoverished communities, where education is usually the only way out,” Anthony said. “And you take that one resource that we have hanging on, and you take it from us.”
The Guilford County school board voted to close three elementary schools at the end of next school year as part of consolidation efforts. All have predominantly Black student populations.
Angail Wiley attended the now-shuttered Vandalia Elementary School in Greensboro until 2008. She appreciated that most of her teachers were Black, as were about 70% of students. Wiley said she felt confident and inspired, and the school’s photography club helped shape her career. Today, she works as a photographer.
“It was definitely a school where you could find your identity as a Black person,” Wiley said.
The Latest Blow
In Bladen County, Black residents say they have been treated unfairly for generations.
A 2021 New York Times podcast featured the Bladen County Improvement Association, a political action committee that encouraged Black voters to use absentee ballots to elect Black candidates. Some white residents argued the group was cheating, despite a lack of evidence.
“It’s about making the right decision for the county and the faculty and students. Every child is important, every faculty member is important.”
Mackie Singletary, Bladen County school board chair
The accusations were set amid an election scandal that rocked the county after the 2018 election. Republican Mark Harris claimed victory in the 9th Congressional district, but the state tossed the results due to voting irregularities. Leslie McRae Dowless, a local Republican political operative, was indicted on fraud charges related to what prosecutors described as a ballot-harvesting scheme. Dowless died in 2022 before he went to trial. At least four others who were indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit felony obstruction of justice and illegally possessing an absentee ballot that did not belong to them pleaded guilty.
Last month, some Improvement Association members pushed back against a proposal from the county commission chairman to shrink the number of commissioners from nine to five. Critics, including the Improvement Association, the North Carolina NAACP, and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, argued the change would limit Black voters’ power. The board chairman, Cameron McGill, ultimately abandoned the idea.
“They don’t care about us,” Ophelia Munn-Goins, a Bladen County commissioner and Improvement Association member, said of local white leaders. “They want to erase all the history and progress we’ve made in the last 60 years.”
The closure of East Arcadia School is the latest blow to Black residents, said Munn-Goins, who served on the school board from 2004 to 2016. Leaders had proposed closing the school before, most recently in the 2023-2024 school year.
“That school needed to close down,” Bladen County Commissioner Charles Ray Peterson said in March. “It’s not a good idea for the county, and it’s costing us.”
The school district has said it wants to reduce its “footprint.” It consolidated Plain View Elementary and Tar Heel Middle to form the K-8 Tar Heel School that opened in 2024 in the western side of the county. There were talks of consolidating schools on the eastern side, but the school board decided it would be too expensive, Munn-Goins said.
Parents like Jessica Dominguez, whose four children have attended East Arcadia over the last decade, said the school did not get the attention and care that other schools in the district received. She spoke against its closure at three public hearings the school board hosted this year. Her 7-year-old daughter, Sophia, just finished second grade at the school.
While most East Arcadia students are reassigned to Clarkton School of Discovery, a small number will go to Bladen Lakes Primary School in Elizabethtown. Dominguez worries that her daughter will be separated from her classmates. “It’s been a hurdle to just try to figure out how to make this easier for her,” Dominguez said. “I really don’t think they were listening to us.”
She continued: “I really don’t think East Arcadia was treated fairly in the way other schools in the county were. And it’s a shame what they did and how they let that school down.”