Poverty, flight hit urban schools with one-two punch.

Byline: Peter Smolowitz and Ann Doss Helms

Aug. 20--Middle-class families have long shunned Shamrock Gardens Elementary, wary of the school's low test scores and high poverty.

Now, a growing number of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools face the same struggle.

From University City in the north to Quail Hollow in the south, parents are abandoning more and more schools with poverty rates they consider unacceptable.

The trend is not everywhere: Most of the county's schools are not seeing flight. But in the past three years, about 1 in 5 schools has seen at least a 10 percentage-point increase in poverty rates.

Enrollment of gifted students has plummeted in several high schools. At the same time as this so-called "bright flight," these schools have seen a surge in low-income students, who tend to be lower performers.

Most of the departing families wind up in the district's suburban schools. A smaller but growing number are leaving CMS or avoiding it entirely.

"I didn't want to take a chance on my kids," said Carol Van Buren of Charlotte, who chose a private kindergarten for her daughter, partly because the CMS gifted program she considered was too far away and its poverty rate too high.

Experts say no public school system has successfully lured back middle-class parents once they started to flee. The rising student poverty rates that follow can depress property values and dampen efforts to attract families and businesses.

"I just don't see how a school district remains healthy if it is not important to the middle class,"…