Dec. 17, 2009        

New realities settle in for school board  

With fewer theatrics than the first meeting and more detailed debate, the realities of governing started settling in this week for the new majority and the new minority of the Wake County school board.

The new majority’s unvarnished display of political power Dec. 1 all but guaranteed Tuesday’s meeting would pack the house, so it wasn’t surprising that seats were scarce and people spilled into the hallways well into the evening.

What they saw during eight hours of meetings was a group of four school board members who are more comfortable in the minority role of questioning, provoking and doing their best to guide policy without a fifth vote on the nine-member board.

The five-member majority also was becoming more familiar with the fact that executing a plan is more difficult than promising one. At times the frustration was obvious.

In between, the two groups showed some willingness to compromise – but only to a point. This is clearly a divided board in a divided community. Just the public comment section of the meeting took three hours as 48 speakers asked to address the board. Those opposed to the current majority outnumbered supporters roughly three to one.

Delays in deciding about mandatory year-round schools

Both critics and supporters of the new board majority thought it would be a fairly straightforward decision to end mandatory year-round school assignments.  A campaign promise of particular interest to board member Deborah Prickett, the new majority hoped to make all year-round assignments voluntary and convert many year-round schools to traditional calendars beginning in 2010-2011.

Offered as a resolution Dec. 1, it quickly ran into a problem of timing at Tuesday’s meeting. All of the board members felt strongly that parents must be surveyed to accurately gauge demand. But they also felt an accurate survey should allow parents to respond by mail or online. Giving parents a chance to respond by mail means the board won’t have all of its responses until March. That, in turn, means the superintendent can’t recommend which schools to change until April.

April is too late for many parents and all principals to be making scheduling decisions for the coming school year. While the board did not formally kill the idea of converting schools in 2010, it seems more likely the change will be made for 2011-2012.

The sheer size of the change also became more apparent during the discussion. About 40,000 students attend 51 year-round schools. The staggered year-round schedule allows the schools to accommodate roughly 25 percent more students than a traditional calendar.

Enrolling a child in a year-round school used to be voluntary in Wake County, but today more than 80 percent of the student body at 34 schools is mandatorily assigned to the year-round calendar. These are the schools where parents are most likely to request a conversion to a traditional calendar.

But as the following chart shows, converting that many schools to a traditional calendar – and losing roughly 25 percent of capacity – means at least several thousand students would be left without a seat. They would need to be reassigned.

If the school to which they are reassigned is already full, it could trigger more reassignments. (Click here for a school by school breakdown.)

The figures here are simply estimates based on available information. The final numbers could be lower – or they could be much higher. That is the challenge board members face. It isn’t possible to calculate an accurate figure without knowing what schools parents want to convert and who will stay once they are converted.

By night’s end, board member John Tedesco pulled the motion off the agenda. “There is too much we just don’t know yet,” he said.

The school system will begin to survey parents after the holiday break. A draft of the survey can be found here.

Hiring a new interim lawyer

While the issue of year-round school assignments bogged down, the new majority found it far easier to sweep aside challenges to a resolution that calls for hiring an interim special legal counsel.

The majority approved a resolution at its first meeting to hire Thomas Farr of the firm Ogletree Deakins, but it was back on the agenda for additional conversation Tuesday at the request of several minority members. Both Farr and his firm are well-respected and well-connected, especially within the Republican Party, according to news reports.

The resolution, approved during a flurry of unexpected changes at the first meeting, calls for Farr to review the system’s current legal expenses and offer advice on “litigation, policy and personnel matters” as requested by the board chairman.
Board member Kevin Hill started Tuesday’s conversation on the topic by pointedly asking if the law firm, which specializes in labor law for corporate clients, was hired to build a case against Superintendent Del Burns so he could be fired.

Tedesco, who handled much of the conversation on this topic, stated flatly that firing Burns was not the intent. Tedesco responded similarly when asked if the firm’s experience in redrawing district boundaries was the reason for employing Farr. The school board will need to redraw its district boundaries after the 2010 census.

A more likely reason to use Farr, Tedesco said, would be to defend the system if future reassignments trigger a civil rights challenge. Such a suit has been threatened by the state chapter of the NAACP.

With those details clarified, Hill asked that the board vote at its next meeting on whether to bid out the job of reviewing legal fees rather than awarding it to Ogletree, Deakins without competition. The request was defeated 5-4.

New assignment plan informally discussed

While it received limited attention given the many changes announced at the Dec. 1 meeting, an informal outline of how a new assignment plan might work in Wake County was offered by board member John Tedesco last week.

In a 10-minute interview posted on the website of WRAL.com, Tedesco said what the board would like to do is eliminate the current assignment system of attendance nodes and use community assignment areas instead.

As many as 20 or 25 assignment areas would each contain a small number of elementary schools feeding into a smaller number of middle schools. The middle schools would then feed into one high school.

Each area would also offer parents a choice of traditional calendar schools, year-round calendar schools and a magnet school program. In separate interviews, Tedesco has described the magnet programs as academically gifted centers.

Not all parents would get their first choice of schools and some busing would be needed because of capacity issues and the physical location of schools. Seattle intends to use a similar assignment plan and is now working on the transition.

It would take at least a year to map out the community assignment areas and another year to begin the transition, Tedesco explained. That means full use of the plan could not be in place until the 2012-2013 school year.

In a separate interview, board Chairman Ron Margiotta said Tedesco’s explanation is only a preliminary idea and no formal plans are in place. The school board is scheduled to hold its first committee meeting in January to discuss a resolution that would change the current attendance policy.  Margiotta has not yet announced who will serve on that committee.

Letter sent to magnet school parents

Hoping to tamp down the emotions of worried students and parents who attend Wake County’s magnet schools, board Chairman Ron Margiotta sent a letter to all magnet school staff and families telling them “no discussions have been held about the magnet system or its future.”

Margiotta took the unusual step of sending the letter directly to parents last week following angry comments by parents and students at the Dec. 1 meeting and numerous news stories about the program’s fate.

“As the Board moves forward, the magnet system will certainly be part of our discussion in improving education for all children but only with the input of parents, staff and taxpayers,” he said in his letter. “Your involvement in the discussion process is vital to achieving academic excellence for all our students.”

While some speakers at this week’s board meeting acknowledged the letter, it seemed to have little effect on their opinions about how the new board majority will treat the program.

More than two dozen speakers, many of them students at Enloe, spoke passionately about the value of bringing poor and middle-class families together in one school in ways that cannot be measured academically.

Anusuya Ramasubramanian, the 2007 valedictorian at Enloe High School who is now a student at Stanford University, asked the board to consider those benefits when deciding the future of the program.

“When I walk down the hallways and I know that the girl standing next to me has a two-year-old child and is 14 years old, that broadens my perspective and I take that everywhere I go,” Ramasubramanian told school board members.

“At schools like Stanford, where students come from very good public schools where most of the people are very similar to them, they don’t have that sort of outlook…. They think poverty doesn’t exist in the United States. Is that what we want to teach our children? That they don’t need to worry about poverty?”

In separate comments, Margiotta has said he does not know how new attendance policies will affect magnets, but he considers them an integral part of the school system.

Noteworthy…

… Rene Herrick, Wake County’s Teacher of the Year and a member of the Partnership’s Board of Directors, has been named the North Central Regional Teacher of the Year, which puts her in the running for the North Carolina Teacher of the Year. Click here for details.

…. By virtue of his election as school board chairman, Ron Margiotta has joined the Partnership’s Board of Trustees. The election of Tony Gurley as chairman of the county commissioners earlier this month means he will also join the Partnership’s board. The Partnership is pleased to welcome both to the organization.

… An opinion piece endorsed by 20 NC State University faculty members was recently published in The News & Observer encouraging the school board to keep schools from becoming economically segregated. While many comments have been offered on both sides of the issue, the piece is one of just a few from those in higher education. It can be found here.  
 
 

Wake Education Partnership is a 501(c)(3) non-profit created in 1983 to support public schools, in part by educating the community on current school issues. Most of its financial support comes from local business. Send comments to Tim Simmons, VP Communications, at  tsimmons@wakeedpartnership.org