THREE COLUMN NETWORK
SINCE 2014
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OUR FIRST LOCATION
HAVE WE FOUND AN EXCELLENT SITE?
Posted February 20, 2014
Three Column Sandhills Central will be opening this fall in the old Lumberton Municipal Building (the old city hall / fire station) on South Elm Street. Three Column Sandhills West will be joining us in a few months once the old McDougald Furniture Company building on Main Street is ready for occupancy. Plans are afoot for Three Column Marlboro, just across the border in the Bennettsville-Clio area, and we’re talking with folks from Fayetteville to Florence about the next few years. We even have a sister-school just outside of Boston, where they don’t know anything about barbecue or chicken and pastry! All of our joyful learning communities will have a lot in common, but each one will be uniquely designed with, not for the town, the families, and the learners it serves. We like small towns, and we love the diversity of this part of the Carolinas
BUILDING AND SUSTAINING
MORE ABOUT THE AREA
Posted February 20, 2014
.For learning guides who might be coming to us from other places, this is what we tell them about this part of the Carolinas:
Lumberton, North Carolina, is the county seat of Robeson County, which has always been a majority-minority area with roughly equal populations of Caucasians, African-Americans, and Native Americans. (If you’re not from the South, you may be amazed to know that “back in the day,” when segregation was the law of the land, many places had not two, but three separate sets of restrooms and drinking fountains!) In recent years, relationships among “the three races” have improved significantly, but new challenges arose as the demographics changed: the Hispanic population has increased significantly, and in the past few years a significant number of immigrants from Southeast Asia have moved to the area, where many work in agriculture and in the poultry-processing plants in nearby Red Springs and Raeford or in the hog-processing plant near Tar Heel.
FACTS AND FIGURES
Posted February 20, 2014
According to the Wikipedia article, there are just over 21,000 people in Lumberton as of the 2010 census, and about 160,000 in the Combined Statistical Area of Robeson and Scotland Counties. Lumberton is about 30 miles south of the Fayetteville metropolitan area, which has about 350,000 people thanks to the presence of Fort Bragg, via Interstate 95, and it’s about 20 miles north of the South Carolina border. As a cooperatively owned non-public school, Three Columns Sandhills will be able to draw students from both sides of the border … an area where the factory-model, same-size-fits-all educational approach has been seen as “failing” for decades.
