Innovative middle school applications open: Haywood schools expand early college model
Haywood Innovative will be housed in the Dogwood Building, currently in use by HEC.
Lily Levin photo
Haywood County School Board at a Jan. 12 meeting officially gave the new Haywood Innovative middle school the green light to open its application to prospective students.
“We are looking for students who choose to be here, who are motivated to be here, who would benefit from a rigorous and accelerated middle school experience,” said Lori Fox, principal of Haywood Early College and Haywood Innovative.
Haywood County schools Superintendent Trevor Putnam similarly described best-fit students — as “mature for their age” and “academically minded.”
These students will hail from inside and outside the county school system. Some might already have connections to the early college.
“Of our currently enrolled Haywood Early College students, many of them have siblings that are either private or homeschool, that if given the appropriate option, would take advantage of it,” Putnam said, referring to the middle school.
Haywood Innovative is designed to model HEC with respect to academic excellence. And ideally, students advance into the latter for high school.
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With greater than 95% of the student body achieving grade level proficiency, and a similarly outstanding percentage reaching career and college readiness, it’s clear that HEC enrolls and cultivates high-achieving students.
But academics are not the sole metric of school success, nor the sole indicator of student growth, within each of North Carolina’s 138 early colleges.
Also known as Cooperative Innovative High Schools, these schools target at least one of three categories of student: those “at risk of dropping out of high school, first-generation college students and/or students who would benefit from accelerated learning opportunities.”
HEC’s application asks each candidate to indicate if they are a “first-generation college student (first person in family to attend 4-year university)” or “in need of a more rigorous and advanced curriculum and learning opportunities,” meaning that the school has chosen two of three student categories to target, although it seems that HEC caters more explicitly to the third one. Beyond asking for name and basic contact information, most of the form is dedicated to identifying courses said applicant has already taken.
Cooperative Innovative High Schools also strive “to address the equity gap” of over-representation of “white students from affluent, college-going backgrounds” in “traditional dual enrollment programs,” according to an EdNC article.
HEC, however, bucks the early college trend when it comes to this statement.
Its student body is 91% white, compared to Tuscola and Pisgah’s 82%, Central Haywood’s 79% and 85% of all students enrolled in Haywood County Schools.
Likewise, HEC has a relatively low proportion — 30.4% — of economically disadvantaged students, especially when compared to neighboring public high schools. At Tuscola, Central Haywood, and Pisgah respectively, economically disadvantaged students make up 45.8%, 75.9% and 48.3% of those enrolled.
Yet UNC Chapel Hill Professor Douglass Lee Lauen pulled data from nearly all CIHS across North Carolina showing that, while these schools benefit all who attend them, “students from groups underrepresented in college, such as black and brown students and students from economically disadvantaged families” stand to gain the most.
“It’s not that we don’t look at [identities of prospective students]. It’s just that it’s we’re not really separating based on that,” said Putnam of the application process.
Writing for Forbes, organizational psychology professor Nancy Doyle discussed how imposter syndrome — the feeling of being a fraud or that you don’t belong, more common among those with marginalized identities — can prevent candidates from seeking out opportunities they’re qualified for.
In the same vein, Doyle explains that low diversity isn’t caused by a lack of talented individuals from minority groups, but rather by the “multitude of ways in which we chase people away before they have even set foot in the door.”
School choice history
“Public schools have entered a competitive market with the addition of charter schools and other things, and we want to have the best offerings so that kids and parents choose our schools,” Putnam said.
Fox is excited by the challenge this new market brings to schools — and to her leadership.
“Competition makes all of us better, and I think it pushes us to provide more opportunities for students within our district. So, I think that’s my angle, is just trying to provide every opportunity we can for high schoolers in Haywood County and now middle schoolers,” she said.
Though some educators and academics question exactly for whom such “competition” provides more opportunities.
While in theory, school choice provides options to any parent dissatisfied with how the public system is serving their children, it doesn’t always go that way in practice.
Quite a few charter and private schools, lacking the elected leadership central to accountability and oversight of the public school system, have filed for bankruptcy or become embroiled in lawsuits.
Indeed, Haywood County’s Shining Rock Classical Academy lost a sweeping ruling in late June 2025 to parent and former board member Rebecca Fitzgibbon, who’d filed an original lawsuit to obtain public records about Head of School Josh Morgan’s alleged bullying of students. The school had filed a defamation countersuit.
SRCA receives government funding via taxpayer dollars — like all charter schools — a perk that’s extended rapidly to private school attendance through voucher programs in North Carolina.
The Opportunity Scholarship, passed in 2013, was originally a program for low-income students to attend private schools.
“The premise was that poor students were trapped in public schools (often referred to as ‘failing’ public schools) and needed an ‘opportunity’ to attend a private school,” wrote Don Martin, former Superintendent of Wilson/Forsyth County schools.
There are hidden inequalities even within low-income student voucher programs. Private schools are not required to provide transportation and lunch to their students, which “can create a barrier for many low-income families” attending those schools free of charge, reported EdNC in 2024.
The state disbursed a record-setting 32,549 vouchers in 2023-2024 and approximately $185 million worth of funds.
That was before the North Carolina General Assembly’s universal voucher program went into effect, allowing any family, regardless of socioeconomic status, to apply for government funding to attend private schools.
The Office of State Budget and Management estimated that this program would cut more than $22 million from public schools statewide due to changes in enrollment, while increasing private school spending by $115 million, resulting in a $93 million increase in the annual K-12 budget.
The 2024-2025 Department of Public Instruction report shows that approximately 8%, or 6,710 out of all 80,472 recipients, used the expanded program piloting that academic year to leave a public school. In other words — while a minority of vouchers were renewals of prior allotments, and 7,301 awardees were beginning kindergarten — most recipients had already been paying full private school tuition.
Meanwhile, the state disbursed just over $432 million for the annual program.
The 2025-2026 school year has seen the addition of over 24,000 vouchers and 36,046 new students. 75% of recipients are white, 11% are Hispanic, 11% are Black and 10% are two or more races, while 3% are Asian and 1% are American Indian and Alaskan Native.
By comparison, 43% of all students attending public school in North Carolina are white.
Impact on public schools
Public schools are funded through state, federal and local dollars. The state of North Carolina finances 61% of educational expenses, on average, for each of its districts. Though, it currently ranks 50th in the nation — above only Idaho — in funding level per student, and dead last in funding effort, according to the Education Law Center. The state’s cost-adjusted 2023 instructional expenses were $12,193 per pupil — $5,660 less than the national average.
In addition to the General Assembly’s politically driven cuts to public schools in the face of rising capital expenses, part of the North Carolina’s poor funding record can be traced back to its highly complex formula. The state is part of a handful that do not allot a base amount of funding per student.
However, enrollment still matters. Average daily membership — the average number of students in a district on a given day — determines how many staffing positions the state will fund, among other items like supplemental money and classroom equipment.
District ADM formulas are dependent on grade level. For example, it takes 24 sixth graders leaving the system to lose one classroom teacher staffing position in 2025-2026, 26.5 in grade 9 and 29 students in grades 10-12, rounded to the nearest one-half position.
“The issue that [Haywood County schools was] facing at the middle school level, where they were seeing enrollment loss during those years, or students’ parents choosing other options outside of Haywood County schools during that time for certain groups of students, and when they said, ‘Okay, [Haywood Innovative] may be an opportunity for us to retain enrollment by providing an option,’” said Shelley White, HCC President.
Putnam said one of the motivations for attracting some 75 family members of HEC students — currently at a charter or homeschool — to Haywood Innovative is to then “get them to the finish line in high school.”
Indeed, rural counties like Haywood, with lower district ADMs and thus fewer staffing positions, face harsher material and political consequences with migrating students. In addition to having to cut teachers, the school system and its budget could be more heavily scrutinized by county commissioners.
For Haywood County schools, with county-level per-pupil appropriations, any student loss correlates to a direct loss in funding, likely to be felt at the instructional level.
Indeed, Haywood’s relative funding effort — the county’s willingness to fund public schools, defined as the relative measure of how much it spends on education compared to its total local revenue — ranks 85th of the 100 counties in North Carolina.
So, Putnam is trying to attract students to the district, and Haywood Innovative is one piece of that puzzle.
“Our kids, we want them to be seen more favorably than any other district’s kids, because at the end of the day, that’s what colleges and scholarship committees are looking for — who has the most rigor in their school system and who has taken advantage of that rigor, and where do they rank,” said the Haywood superintendent.
“And if you look at that on an economic level, that’s money freed up for our parents, not having to pay for them to go to college, which is money reinvested in the local economy,” he added.
