School unity is Wake casualty

Leaders foresee fractures, mending

Wake County's proposed shuffling of more than 11,000 children from one public school to another doesn't just pose problems for individual students and their parents.

It also will pick apart high school bands, sports teams, academic clubs and parent groups.

Schools' financial boosters will leave. Momentum will shift. The social fabric of school communities will rend.

But eventually, school leaders say, it will mend.

"It's always disjointing for a year," said Steve Takacs, principal at North Raleigh's Wakefield High School, which is scheduled to gain 374 students from Wake Forest-Rolesville High and lose 445 to Millbrook. "In a sizable reassignment, you've got the prospect of losing athletes, art students, PTA parents and so on.

"On the other hand, you pull in other students."

Takacs knows. Three years ago, his school sent about 200 students to Wake Forest-Rolesville and got about 200 from Millbrook -- the reverse of next year's shift.

"For the new kids, there's an opportunity to get involved," Takacs said. "It's traumatic for some kids, but it's exciting in other ways. In a perfect world, you break even. It never quite works out like that."

And thus Wake County's furious growth, which leads to school reassignments every year, not only builds communities, it sometimes tears them down.

Sophomores start anew. Siblings are split between schools. Parents drive farther and root for multiple math or soccer teams.

"When you live in a neighborhood, you want to feel like you belong to some high school," said Christine Polli, the mother of four Wake students and a vice president of Cary High School's Parent Teacher Student Association.

Polli has grown accustomed to pulling for Green Hope High School, where her oldest daughter graduated, and Cary High, where another daughter goes. Now, her son will be sent to a third school, the new Panther Creek High.

"You want to say this is your football team or your soccer team," Polli said. "That can't happen when you keep getting moved back and forth."

The effect of major reassignments on groups that give schools their social support structure can be swift and dramatic.

"The reassignment pretty well took out my whole PTSA board," said Raleigh's Margaret Frucht, president of Millbrook High's parent group. "That's my fund-raiser, my president-elect, character education, you name it. Plus five or six of our athletes. It has been devastating."

The Millbrook parents slated for reassignment, along with their children, contribute considerable time and money to the school, Frucht said. "If you divide us, that makes it harder for us to help the school," she said. "When we're gone, we're gone."

If the school board adopts the proposal that school administrators issued Monday, the move of 11,495 students would be the largest reassignment in Wake's history. Administrators say they must respond to record growth -- which brought the county 6,436 new students this year -- by filling seven new schools and reducing crowding at existing schools.

Amid the annual furor over reassignment plans -- some more substantial than others -- it's easy to forget that Wake schools have a solid reputation, their leaders say.

"All the schools are good," said Takacs, Wakefield's principal. He has taught at or helped lead six high schools including Millbrook, Cary, Sanderson, Broughton and Enloe. "We will teach whoever comes. They will be fine. The fabric of the school will go on."

When Wakefield lost hundreds of students, including some star athletes, to Wake Forest-Rolesville three years ago, supporters feared its winning football team would suffer, Takacs said.

But since then, he observed, "We've done pretty well."

The Wolverines finished their football season two weeks ago. Their record: 14 wins, one loss.

Now that's a welcome number.

(Staff writer Tim Simmons contributed to this report.)