RALEIGH -- A key Wake County school board committee gave staff the go-ahead today to begin developing the outline of a new student assignment plan that would end involuntarily long-distance busing for diversity.
Under the new model, Wake would be divided into a still-to-be-determined number of community assignment zones with contiguous borders. This would end the practice now used to send thousands of low-income students to schools outside of their community.
This step is part of the process being pushed by the new school board majority to move Wake toward community schools. Last month, the board eliminated references to socioeconomic diversity in the student assignment policy and instead made family proximity to school a priority.
A resolution adopted in March gave the school board nine to 15 months to develop a new community-based schools plan.
The school boards student assignment committee agreed today to have staff rather than the committee draw up the initial outline of the new zones.
To give staff direction, committee members told staff to build the zones around high schools based on which elementary and middle schools feed into them. This initial grouping would largely leave many of Wakes 140,000 students going to the same schools after the new zones are adopted.
But using contiguous borders for the zones would mean the reassignment of a few thousand students from Southeast Raleigh and downtown Raleigh who are currently sent to places such as North Raleigh, western Wake and Garner for diversity reasons.
Some citizen members of the committee warned that ending busing for diversity could overcrowd schools and take away magnet seats. Many of Wakes 33 magnet schools are located in Southeast Raleigh and downtown Raleigh.
School board member John Tedesco, chairman of the committee, said some magnet schools could see a higher percentage of neighborhood kids being assigned to them. But he said the combination of the opening new schools in Southeast Raleigh and the possible creation of new magnet programs could mean theres no overall reduction in the number of magnet seats.
Tedesco said staff could have some initial maps back to the committee as soon as July.
