How the numbers will shake out is anyone's guess, but it would be safe to bet that the Wake County school board elections Tuesday will be decided by a relatively small group of people. That means every voter's influence will be magnified. And it makes it all the more important for people who have a chance to vote to do so -- mindful of the crucial issues on the table.
The issues go to the heart of how North Carolina's largest school system carries out its duty to give every student, no matter his or her family situation, an equal chance to put down the kind of sound academic foundation needed for a good start in life.
There is a very real risk that Wake could turn its back on that duty. Oh, it would be with the best of intentions and with arguments that children from poor backgrounds would be better off. But abandoning the school system's efforts to achieve diverse student enrollments, as several school board candidates say they would do, would let loose a cascade of unfortunate consequences. First among them would be consigning students who happened to live in lower-income neighborhoods to schools where the obstacles to classroom success were unusually and unfairly high.
Those who dismiss the negative effects of high-poverty surroundings point to the role of individual responsibility -- discipline, hard work, good moral character -- in determining whether students succeed or fail. Of course a well motivated student can overcome high obstacles indeed. But that motivation can be harder to cultivate in an environment where poverty leads to despair, where peers are little help as role models, where parents may not be equipped to offer much support, where teachers may be only too ready to assume the worst.
Wake County now tries to keep any given school from tilting too far toward a high-poverty enrollment. It is an enlightened policy that may not have brought the school system to the Promised Land, but it has prevented a division into have and have-not schools that would crush the prospects of many students while changing the county's entire socioeconomic landscape.
The losers if that were to occur would be too numerous to mention -- not only students, but also all those residents who count on good schools countywide as a cornerstone of Wake's prosperity and of their property values.
There's no need to detail the troubles so common in America's largest cities to make the point that schools trying to serve poor neighborhoods usually end up fighting a battle they can't win. And when the schools struggle, most anyone who can move away does just that. The neighborhoods spiral further into poverty, with its associated ills. They become like wounds on the civic body that won't heal. How's that work for civic well-being? Imagine what Raleigh would be like under that scenario, and imagine how the rest of the county would be hurt.
The diversity critics call for neighborhood schools, as if most families in Wake couldn't already send their children to the school closest to their home or one reasonably nearby. Of course neighborhood schools are desirable, for lots of reasons. But not if they become failure factories and engines of neighborhood decline.
Pour enough money into those high-poverty schools to make up for all their disadvantages? That's what the critics want to do. But this is in a county that has labored for years to achieve even a modestly respectable level of school funding. On that score it regularly lags behind its peers. What makes anyone think extra money to help the "educationally disadvantaged" would be any easier to come by than money to help the broad range of children, including those whose parents are wealthy and well-connected? The notion of that kind of premium funding in Wake County is farcical -- cruelly so.
The school board has nine seats. Members are elected from their own districts by the voters in those districts. Because the four-year terms are staggered, only four of the nine seats are being contested Tuesday. That means that a majority of the county's voters won't have a voice. The stakes for them are just as high as for those who will be able to cast a ballot.
But it is the voters in those four districts who in many respects hold Wake's future in their hands. This is the time for everyone to think about how best to keep the county moving along a path toward an even brighter future that hinges on the success of each and every school and the young people those schools serve.
The News & Observer has given its editorial endorsement to four candidates who, among their other strong attributes, share the belief that diversity in student assignments works best for all. Those candidates are Rita Rakestraw in District 1, incumbent Horace Tart in District 2, Karen Simon in District 7 and Lois Nixon in District 9. Consider yourself lucky if you live in one of those districts. Your vote could be the one that makes the difference -- for yourself, your family and your community.
