Patton Football will be JV ONLY for this upcoming season!
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Patton Football 2024
- Thread starter BlueDevil1996
- Start date
If I’m a senior I’m moving to another school
It’s probably the right move for the team. I’m told they only had 26 kids out total on the first day of practice. Their new coach is working hard to turn things around there and most of the kids they have are sophomores and freshmen. Putting them through a losing varsity season without having time to get them in shape wouldn’t have helped.
I know parents are upset with the school admin/coaches....but the blame lays firmly on the BCSB there is no need for 4 High Schools in Burke County, this situation didn't happen overnight, it didn't happen over the past 365 days, if the Board is paying attention, they saw the writing on the wall post COVID with school enrollment. They have not been paying attention and have been serving their own interests.
I have heard this very thing from multiple people in the area with BCSB. At most 3 schools in BC never should have been 4.
We were going to have three high schools about twenty years ago, but the good people of Valdese threw a fit when we were building a new school and said they had been promised “their own school” when the county consolidated in the early 70s. There was no way to put the third high school in Valdese and make it work for everyone else (Draughn only sort of is in Valdese) and the school board members representing Valdese, Drexel and Rutherford College were fighting against any other plan. So, we ended up having four. But most of the county didn’t actually want that.
We’re would they have put it? 3 schools making Patton pretty much Patton and having Drexel kids and maybe a tiny bit of back end of Valdese go there with the Salem kids. Freedom was bottle necked up they needed Patton but would they have had room for Drexel kids there?
I thought a great place would be out behind Bethel road close to 18. Lots of wooded area back there close to Waffle House and past what was sagebrush on the hill
I thought a great place would be out behind Bethel road close to 18. Lots of wooded area back there close to Waffle House and past what was sagebrush on the hill
There was somewhere they had in mind close to the interstate and I think it was the big field on the south side of I-40 between Bethel and Drexel roads. All the schools would have been around 1200 kids, with Freedom being slightly larger.
Here the trickle down affect now
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no need for country club Draughn or Patton. But you got a dude in Freedom now. Whole county will go if the players have sacks. They will stay where they are if they are like those past two draughn teams.
Looks like Daughn got two of the better Sr from Patton and 1 from Freedom even on a down year Daughn comes thru with a few extra players!!
Wilkes Central will host RS Central on Sept. 6th
There is and has been too much politics in Burke County. It goes way back in time too!
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There is and has been too much politics in Burke County. It goes way back in time too!
It has to be because it doesn't make sense from a numbers point of view. There are about 90,000 people in Burke County and there are about 45,000 in McDowell. 45,000 can be serviced by one 4A high school so technically Freedom could be 4A (like they used to be) and East Burke and one other school would be 2A, which would be plenty to cover the enrollment of Burke.
This doesn't take population distribution and geography in the county in account. Freedom essentially gets "west of Morganton" and west of US 64 south of Morganton, which is the biggest area and has the lion's share of the population. Patton gets most of Morganton and Salem east of 64. Draughn gets Drexel, Valdese and most of Rutherford College/Connelly Springs while East Burke gets everything east of that and way down 18 into the George Hildebran area.
So, essentially they broke up the old boundaries of Freedom and East Burke into two schools each. That works OK in the western part of the county, but not so well in the east. Freedom has about 1400 kids, Patton and East Burke each have in the range of 800-900 and Draughn has 600 or 700. But remember the justification for building Draughn was to give that community "their own school".
Well, if they get "their own school", then so does everyone else. There's no justification to bus students past Freedom to go to Patton or past Patton to go to Draughn. Maybe they transfer if they want, but otherwise that's the deal. If we only had three, we might have been able to draw those lines more fairly, but that's not how it worked out, so we're stuck with it.
I get that but there are folks in McDowell County that have to drive or be on the bus for nearly an hour just to get to school. Freedom is centrally located enough to serve more if it needed to. Patton is only like 10 minutes from Freedom and Draughn is 10 minures from East Burke so geographically it doesnt really make sense to me either. It would have made more sense to expand East Burke to accomodate more students instead of building Draughn or expand Freedom instead of building Patton.
We’d already expanded both schools (classroom annexes) apart from the original “starship” designs. I don’t like when kids have to be bussed that far, but you guys already have both middle schools in Marion. Where would you put a new high school?
Anyway, Burke County needed a third high school, but people also love “local” schools and that won out.
I think the actual location of the 3rd high school was going to be between bethel road and the drexel exit. Burke county did need a 3rd high school but 4 was too many and I said that years ago and it shows more now than it did back then. Low numbers, kids transferring, trouble finding coaches and teachers are a result of this. Patton git overcrowded so they had to redistrict and draughn is under crowded. Some the lines are crazy. 3 high schools would have prevented this but you had 3 valdese mafia people on the board who were yes men and did everything they could to get votes. I don't believe we needed a 5th middle school but a 3rd high school yes. 3 decent size competitive schools if the lines were drawn right.
It would allow them to be in a league with some of their regional rivals (Mitchell, MH and Avery) but I don’t think there’s much they can do to get another school built. McDowell already has a low property tax rate, so raising the money could be a problem. Maybe if the new industrial park near the Burke/McDowell county line takes off there will be a population boom, but I personally don’t see it. The “industrial park” we have now not far from the county line in Burke County is closer to I-40, but there’s not been much done there in 20 years or so.
The I figured out they could have done the lines could have worked out well and 3 had 3 pretty decent programs especially In football. I talked to someone the other day and they said it shows more now that there only need one built.
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