I'm guessing this is primarily about voting power and thus the power to direct $$$. Rural constituents are getting outvoted on the big metro school boards, and think those dang inner city kids are getting too much money, so they're complaining to the NCGA to "fix" it - which just means make sure less money and power goes to the city and more goes to the rural areas. They can't get their way in local elections so they'll go to the daddy Republicans in Raleigh to get their way. The GOP has always been for "more control by local government" until the county boys started getting outvoted by the city folk. Pretty simple.
First, there are no rural parts of Mecklenburg County. It's suburbs v. inner city. The northern Mecklenburg County towns of Davidson, Cornelius, and Huntersville have a population of over 100,000 people, with Huntersville at over 59,000. Matthews and Mint Hill have 60,000 combined. Mooresville (37K), Chapel Hill (59K), and Concord (94K) are examples of municipalities that operate their own school districts, so it's not like there isn't precedence for a North Meck or SE Meck school district with independent or combined towns.
But when I say "suburbs v. inner city," you and I both know I mean white v. black. Is it hard to understand that residents in the suburbs tire of seeing the State of NC and CMS fail decade after decade to find a way to educate disadvantaged students with their hard earned tax dollars ? At the same time, per student spending at disadvantaged schools is roughly twice what it is at a suburban school. Then, the school board and county commission fail to build schools in the fastest part of the county as part of a BILLION dollar bond referendum. At the same time, they ignored their own list of priorities to move another school up the list ahead of working to relieve crowding in the northern part of the county.
Matthews and Mint Hill have threatened to lobby to leave the school system or set up a charter campus unless their students are afforded seats in schools in Matthews and Mint Hill, rather than being inexplicably bused.
Growth for 2017 at CMS was only 200 students. CMS is losing out to charters and private schools. I pulled my kid out after 3rd grade, partly because they wanted to send him to what has historically been the worst middle school in the system for decades. Meanwhile people in the city decry CMS as a classroom to prison pipeline. We operate five of the ten largest high schools in NC (Wake County operates the other five), at 3,000+ students each. The new superintendent has hired the husband of one of his cronies he brought with him from his former district to the "newly created job of culinary development manager in the department of community engagement at $85,000 a year."
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/education/article160162294.html Can you blame people for being fed up with this horseshit ?
Ultimately will people have to pay more to find ways to prepare lower socioeconomic students for preschool, kindergarten, third grade reading level, high school diplomas, and beyond. Yes, I know that to be true and the NCGA has worked diligently to destroy school systems statewide. But you can't blame residents for not trusting a bloated bureaucracy that doesn't listen to them and wastes their money with bad overall results. Parents only get one shot at educating their kids.