RALEIGH -- Opponents of the Wake County school board's plans to end use of socioeconomic diversity in student assignment were already in place today before the beginning of a preliminary meeting now in progress.
Several representatives of the grassroots nonprofit Great Schools in Wake were among those waiting in the lobby of the schools administration building on Wake Forest Road to receive tickets for the meeting. And several are in attendance at the meeting of the Committee of the Whole, which precedes the full board meeting at 3 p.m.
The move to take diversity out of the assignment equation at the full board meeting has brought out not only several long-term supporters of the former diversity policy, but also plans by a social action group to demonstrate outside the building. The Coalition for Southern Justice, based in Durham, filed the necessary paperwork to stage the demonstration.
Passage on second reading of a new assignment policy would represent a significant victory for the current board, which has four members who joined after posting wins in contentious elections last fall. It would end decades of Wake County's attempts to balance student populations in an effort to keep schools from having excessive concentrations of low-income or minority students.
Supporters of the change have said the old policy merely hid the low academic performance of students in low-income and minority groups by sending them to schools that were high-achieving in aggregate.
Update:
As the Wake County School Board prepares to reverse its long-time diversity-based assignment plan, about 15 protesters are chanting against the change.
Outside the schools administration building on Wake Forest Road, students from Broughton, Enloe and Cary high schools are carrying signs and shouting "Shut it down!" about the new assignment plan. The plan is up for its second reading later today.
"We have demands for the school board," said Andrew Snee, 15, a Broughton High School freshman and one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the system that was dismissed Friday.
The protesters want the board to put off consideration of the new assignment plan and rescind a policy under which people must get tickets to attend school board meetings. Elena Everett, an activist with from Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, helped organize the protest.
