1970 was the year the Supreme Court’s Swann decision put Charlotte at the center of the national fight over school busing, and it was also the year three of the city’s largest private schools were founded. Two of them, by their own histories, opened as alternatives to the newly integrated public system.
For this, Charlotte Latin School says it was the first K-12 independent school in Charlotte to open integrated. That claim, made in the school’s own materials, is the most important fact about its founding, and it is worth taking seriously.
It started in 1967
Development of the school began in 1967, according to Wikipedia’s history, and the founders’ stated vision was an inclusive school where academic excellence was encouraged, leadership was cultivated, the liberal arts were valued and reading was taught by phonics. The school opened in 1970 on Providence Road in what was then the far southeast of the city, on land that has grown into a 128 acre campus with a lake, wooded areas and buildings for the lower, middle and upper schools.
The founding context matters. Providence Day School, which opened the same September, was started by families organized as the Southeast Community Corporation as an alternative to the integrated public system, according to that school’s Wikipedia entry. Charlotte Latin’s founders made a different choice in the same year, and the school has kept it at the front of its identity for more than fifty years.
The people behind it
The head of school is Chuck Baldecchi, and the faculty numbers more than 180. The school serves about 1,500 students from transitional kindergarten through twelfth grade, with kindergarten and ninth grade as the main entry points, and it is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the Southern Association of Independent Schools and the state’s Department of Public Instruction.
The school has been named a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence by the federal Education Department three times, in 1987, 1997 and 2000, and it received a Cum Laude Society chapter younger than any school in America at the time. It is one of the Malone Family Foundation’s scholarship schools, which fund gifted students who could not otherwise afford the tuition. Its rivals, in the way independent schools have rivals, are Charlotte Country Day and Providence Day.
What it does now
The school’s own phrase is traditional in design, innovative in implementation. The curriculum runs Latin, Greek, French, Spanish and Chinese, the athletic program fields more than sixty teams and has won recent state championships in lacrosse, girls’ soccer, swimming and wrestling, and a building called Inlustrate Orbem, after the school’s motto, opened in 2019. The Honor Code, which the school summarizes as Honor Above All, runs through everything it publishes.
Tuition ran from about $23,750 to $32,900 in the 2024 to 2025 year, with financial aid available. The school describes its faculty and staff as people who teach, coach, encourage, support and care for students, and its relationship with parents as a partnership providing what it calls a moral community that counterbalances contemporary culture. It also says, plainly, that it believes in keeping children appropriately young.
The campus reflects the school’s age and its ambition. What began on a stretch of Providence Road that was largely undeveloped in 1970 has grown to 128 acres with the lower, middle and upper school buildings, athletic facilities, wooded areas and a lake, according to the school. The 2019 building named for the motto, Inlustrate Orbem, meaning Enlighten the World, is the most recent major addition. Enrollment has grown from about 1,400 students a decade ago to more than 1,500.
The school describes each student as known as an individual and as a member of the school family, and it says its faculty treat teaching and coaching as relationships first. Financial aid, transportation, arts and athletics are listed among the amenities, and the alumni association counts more than 3,700 members who remain connected to the school. The Cum Laude Society chapter and the three Blue Ribbon designations are the external measures. The founding claim is the one the school leads with.
Why it matters
Charlotte’s private schools were shaped by the year they were born, and the year was 1970. Some of the city’s most prominent independent schools have spent decades reckoning with why they were founded. Charlotte Latin’s answer, that it opened integrated when it did not have to, is a founding story its peers cannot tell.
Fifty six years later it is one of the largest and most sought after independent schools in the state, on a wooded campus that was countryside when the first class arrived. The families who chose it in 1970 made a decision about what kind of school they wanted, and the school has spent every year since insisting that decision was the point.