{"id":12282,"date":"2012-06-20T10:13:04","date_gmt":"2012-06-20T14:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raleighpublicrecord.org\/?p=12282"},"modified":"2012-06-20T10:13:04","modified_gmt":"2012-06-20T14:13:04","slug":"wake-school-board-votes-new-version-diversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/news\/2012\/06\/20\/wake-school-board-votes-new-version-diversity\/","title":{"rendered":"Wake School Board Votes for New Version of Diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong>In Wednesday\u2019s early morning hours, the Wake County school board voted along party lines to return to a base assignment plan that will attempt to balance student populations.<\/p>\n

The new tack does not reflect a change in policy, but results from a new directive<\/a>. It doesn\u2019t state what metric will be used for balancing populations, but offers census data or family income as possibilities.<\/p>\n

The change to base assignments will take affect in 2013-14, not the upcoming school year.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Board members recessed at midnight for half an hour to try to hash out a version of the assignment plan everyone could agree on. Photo by Will Huntsberry.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThis directive decreases choice and increases mandates,\u201d said Republican board member Deborah Prickett. \u201cThis is no more than social engineering.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThose are the kinds of points of language that will inflame turmoil,\u201d Democratic board member Jim Martin returned. \u201cLet\u2019s look at data. Let\u2019s think. Let\u2019s avoid political chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several Republican board members argued that Democrats should wait until the choice process is fully complete and more data is available.<\/p>\n

Democrats argued they\u2019d seen enough data to know changes must be made.<\/p>\n

\u201cBased on the choice plan enrollment data \u2026 the percentages of lower-income students at many schools that already had higher poverty levels than the district average are predicted to increase,\u201d said Democratic board member Susan Evans.<\/p>\n

The trend was revealed last week by a Record analysis<\/a> of free-and-reduced lunch data.<\/p>\n

The directive calls for a new assignment plan that will focus on student achievement, stability and proximity, but doesn\u2019t direct the order of importance the attributes should be given.<\/p>\n

In the current assignment policy<\/a> proximity is listed as the most important factor.<\/p>\n

To address potential disparities in policy and practice, the directive states, \u201cthe board will revisit policy 6200 [the assignment policy] to develop appropriate socio-economic factors to consider in the assignment process.\u201d<\/p>\n

That means the Democratic majority could change the priorities in policy 6200, as well as add a socio-economic diversity component.<\/p>\n

What the New Policy Will Look Like<\/strong>
\nThe new directive provides a framework for staff to move forward in 2013-14, but it isn\u2019t heavy on specifics. Staff is supposed to come back with recommendations for a new plan in September of this year.<\/p>\n

The biggest take home is that assigning for a certain level of diversity will be a component. In developing the new plan, staff is directed to \u201cintegrate the best practices and strategies\u201d from both the old diversity plan and the current choice plan.<\/p>\n

While the final hybrid is far from certain, the directive clearly states that new plan will be address-based, as opposed to choice based.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Department of Agriculture informed Wake last year<\/a> that it can\u2019t use free-and-reduced lunch data for student assignment purposes, as was the case under the old diversity policy.<\/p>\n

Instead of using other income metrics, such as census data, the Democratic majority could opt to balance schools based on achievement data.<\/p>\n

For instance, the old diversity policy set a cap on the amount of free-and-reduced lunch students that could attend any school. The new plan might set a cap on the amount of students from low-performing nodes that can attend any one school.<\/p>\n

Nodes are small geographical units divided the county for school assignments.<\/p>\n

Proximity and stability will also be important factors in the new plan, according to the directive.<\/p>\n

The directive asks staff to consider employing a \u201cstay where you start\u201d philosophy, which would be designed to avoid reassignments.<\/p>\n

Such a caveat would mean no reassignments within grade levels.<\/p>\n

To address proximity concerns, the directive states each student should receive an assignment \u201cwithin a reasonable distance to his or her residence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Predictability would also be a goal of the new plan. It will \u201cprovide prospective families to the area with a reasonable degree of predictability of a base school assignment,\u201d the directive states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After one year of a choice assignment policy that was enacted by a lameduck Republican majority, the Democratic majority is directing that Wake schools again moves towards a system that controls for diversity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24024,"featured_media":12279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,23,55],"tags":[132,68,505,465],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24024"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}