Consultants tell Asheville City Schools: 'Strengthen belonging in service of learning'

At a June meeting of the Asheville City Schools Board, consultants who conducted a district-wide strategic planning and engagement process presented findings that urge the district to pair its strong community and belonging work with a renewed focus on rigorous, standards-aligned instruction.

The final report, delivered by Amaris Lavender, founder of Love, Joy, Liberation Community Relations Firm, and Julie Kanki, a partner who led the data review with ConnectED and Hanover Research data, summarized engagement with more than 1,000 students, parents, educators and community members and a review of district data spanning multiple studies.

Why it matters: The consultants said the district faces a mix of strengths — close student-teacher relationships, strong specialty programs such as AVID and SELSA, and engaged community partners — and persistent problems that undermine student learning, especially for Black and low-income students.

"Strengthening community belonging in service of learning is a big theme that emerged in all of those different pieces," Julie Kanki said, summarizing the team's central recommendation. The report calls for belonging to be harnessed explicitly to improve learning outcomes rather than used as an end in itself.

Major findings and data points

- Enrollment and poverty: The consultants reported that enrollment is declining and cited a Hanover projection of a decline of 277 to about 1,090 students in coming years, a drop that reduces state funding tied to student counts. They also said the share of students living in poverty is increasing, which affects resource needs.

- Graduation vs. proficiency: Graduation rates have improved, the team said, but grade-level proficiency in reading and math for some groups — notably Black students in grades 9–12 — has declined from 2019 to 2023. The consultants cautioned the district that higher graduation rates have not translated into higher proficiency for every student group.

- Attendance and engagement: Absenteeism rose from about 15% in 2019 to roughly 27% in 2023, the report noted, flagging attendance as a driver of declining outcomes.

- Teacher working conditions: Teachers reported concerns about time for instruction, professional learning and managing student behavior. The consultants described a gap between how families view schools (positively) and how some staff experience day-to-day work (overloaded and unsupported).

Tension points

The report identified recurring tensions the board will need to manage: discipline versus inclusion (restorative practices vs. stricter consequences), rigor versus whole-child approaches, and maintaining the district's personalized small-district strengths without duplicating services inefficiently. Consultants encouraged the board to treat those tensions as polarities to manage rather than either-or choices.

Recommendations and next steps

The consultants outlined six major recommendations and proposed immediate next steps, including: finalizing a "Portrait of a Scholar" (the report's working term for graduate/graduate-profile attributes), forming four implementation teams (mastery/instruction; character/crew; high-quality professionals; organizational effectiveness), and adopting a continuous-improvement-for-equity model to monitor progress.

Superintendent Maggie Fuhrman (identified in the meeting as "Dr. Fuhrman") framed the work as a multi-year implementation and said the district will use the consultants' findings to form action teams and measurable dashboards to track progress. "When our students walk across the stage, we'll have met the attributes that we're going to identify in a portrait of a scholar," Fuhrman said.

Consultants said the district's next steps include tightening the Portrait of a Scholar over the summer, piloting implementation teams in the fall, and returning drafts to the board for further feedback.

Ending: The board asked for time to review the full report and indicated the consultants' recommendations will inform staff work plans and the district's fall implementation cadence.