RALEIGH -- The Wake County school board next week is expected to formally approve several school reassignments approved at a Wednesday night work session, including a controversial move to send a group of students back to Lacy Elementary School in Raleigh.
Students who were transferred from Lacy to Stough last year will be sent back to Lacy so they are closer to home, despite staff concerns that Lacy is overcrowded. Parents in the inside-the-Beltline neighborhood affected by last fall's reassignment of Lacy students, which was approved by the old school board, fought the move and worked hard to raise money to support the four new school board members elected last fall.
Lacy, which recently opened a new building, is already at capacity, and will need temporary classrooms next year to accommodate the influx of students. Stough is about 100 students under capacity.
"That neighborhood had been part of a community for a generation," new board member John Tedesco said about Lacy. "And the goal of building Stough up never occurred. All last year's move did was drive people away from public education into private schools."
In the six-hour work session, the board also approved the move of more than 100 Garner High School students to Southeast Raleigh High School.
Keith Sutton, whose district includes Southeast Raleigh High, opposed it because families had no notice of the move.
But Tedesco, whose district includes Garner High, said the students who will transfer to Southeast Raleigh will almost certainly be assigned there under the new reassignment plan anyway, and Southeast Raleigh has more space for the students than Garner.
"Some of these were inconsistent changes," said Kevin Hill, former chairman of the board. "And it's awfully late in the year to make these changes. It puts a lot of pressure on staff."
The reassignments are the last until the board's student assignment committee crafts a three-year plan for dividing the county into community zones. That process is expected to take nine to 15 months.
The board approved seven changes to the reassignment policy last week and overturned the district's long-standing policy of busing for socioeconomic diversity in favor of neighborhood schools.
Wednesday, the board considered about a dozen assignment changes, but opted to hold off on many until the new neighborhood plan is developed.
