From correspondent Brooks Dareff

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education will discuss a proposed charter school that targets the school district’s achievement gap during its meeting tonight. (See agenda here.)

The Howard and Lillian Lee Scholars Charter School advanced to the next stage of the state application process Wednesday as an N.C. Department of Public Instruction committee sent it forward for an interview in January, said Joel Medley, director of the department’s charter schools office. The state board of education will decide on applications in March.

The school would be named for the former Chapel Hill mayor – the South’s first post-Reconstruction black mayor in a predominantly white town – and his wife, herself a former local educator. Lee applicants plan to open what would by its fourth year be a 723-student, kindergarten-through-eighth grade school at an as yet undecided location in August 2012, according to the application.

City Schools Superintendent Thomas Forcella has disputed the applicants’ contention that the school is needed to help close the achievement gap between white students and black and Hispanic students. Forcella also has noted plans for an 11th district elementary school to open in August 2013 in countering applicants’ citing of schools overcrowding. The Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP has gone on record opposing the charter school, in part because it would divert public money from the school district.

A set of staff recommendations on easing overcrowding in three of the district’s elementary schools for the 2012-13 school year is also among the items on the school board’s agenda. Among the recommendations is spot redistricting one Glenwood Elementary neighborhood to Rashkis, where it would then stay beyond 2012-13.

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. at Chapel Hill Town Hall, located at 405 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Thomas A. Forcella, the superintendent of the Guilford, Connecticut, Public Schools has been named the new superintendent of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.

He succeeds Neil Pedersen, who retires at the end of the school year after 19 years, the longest tenure of any current superintendent in North Carolina.

The school board voted unanimously at a special meeting tonight in Smith Middle School.

The town of Guilford is a suburb of New Haven and is home to a large number of professors and professionals from nearby Yale University and Hospital, according to a district news release.

Forcella began his career as a special education teacher and has served as a principal and a superintendent of high-performing districts in Maine and Connecticut. Test scores under his leadership have risen despite reductions in district funding and an increase in poorer students, according to the release. In 2009 Guilford High School was cited by the state as having the second highest improvement in test scores among hundreds of high schools in the state.

Forcella also has collaborated with universities and fostered partnerships that improved students' test scores. As superintendent of the Cape Elizabeth, Maine, school district he and his school board was named one the three most outstanding school board/superintendent teams in New England.

Look for more on tonight's appointment in Friday's News & Observer and Sunday's Chapel Hill News.