So beloved at the school was he that the rain gardens that were required to be installed on the school grounds by the Town of Huntersville, those that temporarily fill with water after heavy rains, were dubbed “Jimmy Pools” by students.

He experienced the catalytic power of a school community firsthand. It’s that sense of tradition — the idea that generations within the same family attend the same high school, sit in the same classrooms, play on the same athletic fields and wear the same colors — that Poole now mourns.

The fatal blow, he says, was in the way the school board chose to populate Hough.

Four decades after attending his first class at North Meck, three decades after returning as a counselor, and five years after retiring as principal of his alma mater, Poole was among the first to recognize what many others had missed when the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education approved new boundaries for the 2010-11 school year.

With Hough taking all the students in Davidson and Cornelius, and most from Huntersville, North Mecklenburg High School was no longer north Mecklenburg’s high school.

“We lost the Derita area with the opening of Vance,” Poole told the school board before the opening of Hough “We then lost the Long Creek (area) and part of the lake area to Hopewell. We lost the Mallard Creek area with the opening of Mallard Creek High. I knew that we would lose Davidson and Cornelius some day with (what would become Hough) but I never expected to lose most of Huntersville, also.”

Yet that is one of the biggest drawbacks of a county system covering seven distinct municipalities. Student demographics never neatly match town limits. Just ask the folks in Matthews who weren’t originally assigned to Butler High School, which is in Matthews.

For the first time, North Meck is now a school dominated by students from Charlotte. But, Poole concedes, that could change, too. The transit-oriented Bryton development has risen from those one-time cotton fields across N.C. 115 from North Meck, and the I-485 interchange less than a mile south of the school is certain to fuel still more development when the economy finally thaws.

Every time North Meck students were shifted to another school, Poole notes, growth from within the remaining attendance boundary quickly made up for the loss.

“Who knows?” Poole wonders aloud. “Maybe it’ll happen again.”