As NCSSM’s very first leader, Charles “Chuck” Eilber (here in his second year of leading the school), helped create the blueprint that NCSSM still follows four and a half decades after its founding. (photo: NCSSM archives)
Charles R. “Chuck” Eilber, founding Director of North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, has died in Durham where he spent the majority of his life after leaving NCSSM. He was 100 years old.
“I’m awestruck by the challenge that lay ahead of Chuck when he took on the role,” said current NCSSM Chancellor Todd Roberts. “With a shoestring budget, he and the amazing group of founding faculty he assembled turned the abandoned campus of the former Watts Hospital into a world-class high school. They truly accepted the greater challenge and set the standard of excellence NCSSM has been measuring itself by ever since. I had the chance to get to know Chuck during my tenure, and he was always so proud of what he had helped to build and gratified by every new innovation and achievement he saw from the school and its students. At the time of his death, he knew he had helped to launch what is now ranked as the No. 1 public high school in America.”
Born in Detroit on July 16, 1925, Eilber served in the U.S. Navy from 1943-1946 with duty stations in the Pacific and China.
Prior to joining NCSSM, Eilber was the Coordinator of Student Support Programs of Wisconsin Public Schools, served as the Assistant Director of Admissions at Northern Michigan University, was the head of the math department at Interlochen Arts Academy (a boarding school in northwest Michigan) before becoming that school’s director/principal, and taught science and math in the public school system in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Eilber, who earned master’s degrees from Michigan State University and Harvard University and was selected to lead NCSSM from a candidate pool of 250 applicants, relocated with his educator wife Carol (1926-2009) from Wisconsin to North Carolina where he was named Director of NCSSM on July 5, 1979, nearly one year before the school opened.
As a statewide, public residential high school focusing on science and mathematics, NCSSM was an audacious new idea with no models to follow. In a Raleigh News & Observer story published just prior to the completion of his hire, Eilber succinctly defined the innovative approach the new school would follow, an approach that defines NCSSM to this day. Students “won’t be confined [to] learning between 8:30 in the morning and 4 o’clock in the afternoon,” he said, adding that if time spent in a scientist’s lab off campus would be more conducive to learning, “we won’t force them to sit in a classroom with a textbook.”
Eilber served as NCSSM’s director until the summer of 1989, after which he joined the National Science Foundation as a program director in the division of Teacher Preparation and Enhancement. Eilber was the first of four chief executives of NCSSM; since NCSSM joined the University of North Carolina System, the chief executive has held the title of chancellor.
In recognition of Eilber’s leadership, NCSSM’s Charles R. Eilber Physical Education Center was named in his honor on Oct. 19, 1990.
In a 1989 NCSSM newsletter story celebrating the school’s first decade, Eilber and Gov. Jim Hunt, who championed the school’s creation, spoke of NCSSM’s early years. Hunt praised Eilber’s success in shepherding NCSSM through its early years.
“Chuck Eilber has been everything we dreamed of for a director of this school,” Hunt said. “I think its huge success in North Carolina and the model it has become to the nation are due in large measure to his personal vision and to his leadership.”
“It hasn’t all been smooth sailing,” Eilber said of building out a national model from scratch, “but I will always remember and be proud of what we have accomplished together.”
Eilber is survived by his second wife, Elaine Scagnelli, and three daughters, Diane Eilber of Chapel Hill and her husband, Gene Medler, and children, Jordan and Keith Rosado; Janet Eilber of New York City and her husband, John Warren, and children, Madeline and Eva Warren; and Julie Eilber of Boston and child, Charles Begle.
A memorial service is planned for Saturday, Dec. 6 at 2 p.m. at the Croasdaile Village chapel in Durham.
