At first glance, rural, conservative Caldwell Parish, La., and the District of Columbia’s gentrified, left-leaning Capitol Hill neighborhood have little in common.
But both communities recently faced the same challenge: Low-income children and children of color were clustered at one struggling elementary school with plenty of extra room, while nearby higher-performing elementaries feeding the same middle and high school served wealthier, whiter populations, but were on the verge of becoming—or already were—uncomfortably overcrowded.
District leaders in both places hit on the same solution: Merge the schools’ populations and spread them across multiple campuses, grouped by grades, such as K-2 and 3-5.
The proposals sparked tense, emotional debates.
Parents worried about multiple drop-offs, academic quality, and even property values.
Still, one community forged ahead in the face of opposition—and it may not be the one you’d expect.
Integration doesn’t fit neatly into political buckets
In April 2023, the Caldwell Parish school board narrowly approved creating what Superintendent Nicki McCann called “center schools,” reorganizing its three elementary schools by grade bands.
Beginning that fall, Caldwell’s Grayson Elementary went from being a K-5 neighborhood school to a K-1 school serving the entire district. Columbia Elementary—the school with the lowest percentage of students in poverty and students of color—became a grades 2-3 school. And Union Central—the school with the highest proportion of low-income and Black students—became a grades 4-5 school.
Two years in, the community is beginning to reap the benefits of the change: After the 2024-25 school year, Caldwell became Louisiana’s most improved district in progressing students at all grade levels and subjects to “mastery” level on the state assessment.
Meanwhile, D.C. officials paused consideration of pairing Maury Elementary, a high-performing, majority-white school serving mostly middle class and wealthy families, with Miner Elementary, a majority-Black, low-performing school serving mostly children in poverty—at least until 2027.
Was this a case of conservative small-town values outpacing what one D.C. parent called “liberal hypocrisy”? Some experts see a sliver of truth in that narrative but point to something deeper.
Politics aside, “I think in rural spaces, there’s still a sense of community,” said Sheneka Williams, a professor of education at Michigan State University, who is Black and grew up in rural Alabama. “I think you’ve lost that in some of these urban spaces where gentrification has taken hold.”
How district strategies shaped outcomes
Beyond culture, the two districts took very different approaches to building support.
From the parents’ point of view, D.C. officials primarily promoted the move as an “equity play,” the right thing to do for other people’s kids. They didn’t provide specifics about staffing, funding, or programming, leaving families uneasy, parents said.
Paul Kihn, the deputy mayor for education, said his office’s role was to gauge community support, not to persuade people. If the plan had advanced, those details would have come later, he said.
Though the process didn’t result in a pairing—at least not yet—it “did allow us to sow very important seeds in what are incredibly hard conversations to have,” Kihn said.
In Caldwell, on the other hand, McCann and her team publicly championed the benefits for all students—smaller class sizes, new art and music teachers, and increased planning time for educators. They framed the merger not as a sacrifice but as an upgrade.
That framing matters.
“It’s just a hard and emotional conversation to tell anyone that [their] kid is going to be attending a different school,” said Halley Potter, the director of P-12 policy at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Enticements like new enrichment programs or smaller class sizes can be the “spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down,” she said.
Winning teachers over is key
Caldwell leaders also prioritized teacher buy-in. Principals at all three schools quickly got on board and helped rally teachers to support the plan.
Many teachers, in turn, spoke in favor of the merger at public meetings, wrote letters to school board members, and reassured skeptical families.
Educators shared personal stories to connect the merger to their own childhoods. One school leader recounted how his family moved frequently because of financial hardship. A merged school structure, he said, would have given him a more stable peer group.
“We moved whenever the light bill came,” Justin Primm, who runs a career-counseling program for the district, told the school board in April 2023, just before members voted on the proposal. If the merger had been in place back then, “I would have been with the same kids throughout the entire insane process that was my childhood.”
Teachers’ support was pivotal.
“Without teachers’ buy-in, it wouldn’t have been successful,” said Chelsea Rowell, a 1st grade teacher at Caldwell Parish’s Grayson Elementary.
Skipping teacher outreach can backfire
By contrast, in the District of Columbia, officials went straight to the community with their proposal, without first engaging teachers. During a November 2023 virtual meeting with Kihn’s team, Maury parents asked how teachers reacted to the proposal. They were told district leaders hadn’t yet asked them about it.
That lack of early outreach to educators may have cost the pairing proposal key allies, parents who supported the merger say.
Teachers are “pretty credible voices on what is good for a school,” said Jeff Giertz, a Miner Elementary parent who circulated a petition in favor of the pairing.
The bureaucratic structure of D.C.'s process also created confusion. While Kihn’s office was tasked with floating the idea, the District of Columbia public schools would have overseen implementation.
That division made it harder—if not impossible—for Kihn’s team to address parents’ questions: What would happen to teachers? Would the paired campuses retain federal Title I status and the resources that come with it? What concrete benefits would the merger bring for Maury families?
Beyond a few vague possibilities, such as more pre-K seats and easing overcrowding, there were few clear incentives, parents said.
To be fair, sketching out a detailed picture of what the merged schools would look like might not have been realistic, experts said.
“The time and resources expended to map out a really clear implementation plan may not feel worth the effort, if there’s a sense that this isn’t actually going to come to pass,” said Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied racial integration in schools.
But the way D.C. officials structured the outreach—with the deputy mayor’s office floating the plan and DCPS responsible for the specifics—likely made conversations about a tough topic even harder, Siegel-Hawley said.
“It’s not usually helpful to have multiple power centers where people don’t understand the lines of decisionmaking, the authority for decisionmaking,” Siegel-Hawley said. “That makes it more difficult to communicate clearly about goals or implementation. A willingness to communicate openly about what’s at stake and how this is going to benefit the community in really tangible ways are preconditions” for successful school mergers, she said.
Clear communication and a singular focus helped Caldwell
In Caldwell, McCann and her team addressed community questions as thoroughly as they could, educators said. After their initial outreach event, Caldwell’s leaders held a second meeting providing details on how transportation and sports teams would work, two of the community’s biggest concerns.
Caldwell also treated the merger as a stand-alone push. In D.C., the proposal to pair Maury and Miner was just one of a number of controversial ideas on the table during the district’s broader boundary-study process. That diluted the message and created more confusion.
“You can’t bury it in a larger effort,” said Jessica Sutter, who served as a District of Columbia State Board of Education member representing Capitol Hill from 2019 to 2022 and supported the pairing. “You’ve got to say, ‘This is important. Here’s why, here’s how it benefits all of you. Here’s how it’s good for the city and for schools and here’s how we’re going to do it together.’”
A willingness to push forward in the face of opposition is critical
Another critical ingredient: political courage.
“This is going to be a very unpopular and hard process, that there’s going to be a lot of unhappy people,” said Matthew Cropper, the president of Cropper GIS Consulting, LLC, which has worked with districts on redrawing boundaries, including by pairing schools.
In Caldwell, McCann knew she was putting her job on the line. Randy Rentz, a school board member who was among the first on board with the plan, got calls from constituents asking him to reconsider. A couple even threatened to vote him out.
Rentz had long wanted to serve on the board and had campaigned door to door across his rural district. But he felt the merger was the right decision for all children—and was willing to risk his seat.
“If they want to vote me off, that’s fine,” Rentz said in an interview. “I’ll stand for what I think is right for kids. I hope the people in my district understand that.”
In Washington, Mayor Muriel Bowser had the final say. Some supporters believe she hit the pause button on the plan until 2027 to avoid further backlash, timing that conveniently places the decision after the next mayoral election.
“I think the intensity of the neighborhood controversy spooked them, and at the end of the day, I think they tried to split the baby with their recommendation,” Giertz, the Miner father who circulated the petition in favor of the pairing, said.
School choice was more real in one community than the other
One major factor leaders couldn’t control: school choice.
In both places, parents threatened to leave if the mergers went through.
But it would have been far easier for D.C. parents to follow through. Capitol Hill families are surrounded by private schools, and they can use the DCPS lottery system to attend a charter or different public school nearby.
By contrast, Caldwell parents’ choices were much more limited: homeschool, the one small private school in the parish, or a nearly hourlong drive to the closest small city, Monroe.
That lack of alternatives may be one reason most families have come to accept the change, Ericka Broadnax, Caldwell’s Title I supervisor, said.
But acceptance doesn’t mean attitudes changed.
“I don’t think it’s so much that they overcame their bias. I think they just kind of had to do it,” said Broadnax, one of Caldwell’s few Black district leaders. “Some people were like, ‘We’re gonna give it a year, and it’s gonna fail.’ Some people were rooting for it to fail. But then they see that it’s not failing.”
Now, she said, they’re thinking: “’I’m not rocking the boat anymore.’”
Shared values and struggles can transcend even race
Caldwell and D.C. also differ in the character of the communities.
Rural areas like Caldwell tend to be woven together by common values: regular church attendance, close-knit relationships, and a shared struggle over things urban communities might take for granted, such as access to broadband or state-of-the-art health care.
Those shared experiences can create a sense of “community cohesion,” which can transcend a lot of differences—even race, Williams, the Michigan State professor, said.
Shared values and circumstances “bring races together in the South in [ways that] you won’t see in other parts of the country,” Williams said. “It’s a real oddity. Because if you’ve not been to the South, if you’ve just heard stories about it, you hear about all these strained race relations, right? That is true, but then there are these rural communities that can come together because of faith and because we don’t have much.”
Community size played a role, too. Washington, D.C. is a major city of nearly 680,000 people. There are less than 10,000 in all of Caldwell Parish—68 times smaller.
McCann—the face of the merger—grew up in Caldwell, graduated from its schools, sent her children to them, and spent her entire career working in the district. She knew many skeptical parents personally; their children had gone to school with hers.
Teachers were similarly embedded in the community. When they spoke in favor of the plan, people listened.
There’s still dissent. Some teachers and parents preferred the old school structure.
Baron Glass, the lone Black member of the school board, voted against the plan, fearing Black students might face renewed discrimination.
But once the board approved the merger, many opponents worked to make it succeed, said Melisa Gillpatrick, the principal of Columbia Elementary.
“The mindset, the mentality around here is of a community. Not ‘we live in a community,’ but ‘we are the community,’” Gillpatrick said. Even those initially opposed did not “set out to destroy it. This was happening. They were accepting.”
That sentiment is a lot tougher to come by in a place like D.C., Siegel-Hawley, the VCU professor, said.
But that doesn’t mean officials in D.C.—or other urban districts—should throw up their hands, she added.
“They need to pay attention to building the trust, to creating a process that is streamlined, that will allow people to hear clear goals, rationales for them,” she said. “It’s not impossible. They just need to pay attention to the ingredients that made the smaller district successful.”
