A pioneering summer program for gifted high school students in North Carolina will live on for a 50th year after alumni and other donors stepped in with cash in the months since state lawmakers eliminated funding.
The state Board of Education on Thursday was scheduled to authorize the state's public school agency to decide the scope of this summer's North Carolina Governor's School.
Slightly more than $500,000 has been collected so far, and state school board chairman Bill Harrison said Wednesday he expects a foundation or two to add another $200,000 within days.
"We think we're going to make it a lot higher than this and operate two campuses," said Scott Gayle, a Greensboro lawyer who has helped lead the fundraising effort.
The extra money would give at least 500 students, at least one from each of the state's 115 public school districts, five weeks of the enrichment program on two college campuses, state schools Chief Financial Officer Philip Price said.
That is scaled back from last year's six-week summer camp for 600 students at Salem College in Winston-Salem and Meredith College in Raleigh. The General Assembly last year eliminated the program's $849,000 annual funding, citing the need for cuts to close the state's $2.5 billion budget shortfall.
The state school board will ask state lawmakers to restore the state funding for 2013.
State school board member Wayne McDevitt, a Democrat, criticized the Republican-led General Assembly for eliminating the Governor's School while simultaneously choosing to spend $3.7 million to pay for liability insurance for teachers. The move was seen as aimed at undercutting the Democrat-friendly North Carolina Association of Educators, which offered the coverage as a membership benefit.
North Carolina was the first state to create a state-funded summer enrichment program and it became a national model copied by more than a dozen other states. The Governor's School offers selected high school students a few weeks together working on language, math, music, science and other subjects.
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Emery Dalesio can be reached at http://twitter.com/emerydalesio .
