Thanks to Ruth Sheehan for writing about how it is magnet families' turn to feel angst as they await a new school board's decisions about our children's futures.
With three children in the magnet system, attending since kindergarten, I cannot stress enough how these schools, and the families who attend them, have become our neighborhood schools. My youngest, a fourth-grader at Hunter, plays and studies with the siblings of children my older sons have been with for many years, as they are in high school at Enloe. The magnet parents from Cary, Apex, Garner and Raleigh are my neighbors of many years now, as we work together in these PTAs and other booster programs. We are not connected with our base schools in the same way, having never attended them.
Demagnetizing Enloe, Ligon and Hunter (our schools) would mean losing their distinct and diverse characters in which many thrive. Other magnet school communities are equally tight-knit. The neighborhood of magnet schools is a strong one, a quality one.
