It is a complicated business, this switch to neighborhood schools being engineered by the Wake County school board. Put aside for the moment that most students already attend schools near where they live, if they want to - the wheel must be reinvented.
A committee of the board last week unveiled 16 proposed attendance zones oriented around the county's high schools. Does that mean families now can begin to see where their children will be assigned? Maybe, maybe not. Board member John Tedesco, who heads the committee, put it this way: "This is the general shell of one piece of a whole plan. It will be layered over with magnets, choices and preferences." Anybody want an aspirin?
Oh, there are regions as well - five of them, north, south, east, west and central. So once a student moves into middle school or high school, there would be options within the region.
Choice is a good thing for those who want it, just as proximity can be good. But acknowledging that this is all at a very preliminary stage, it's hard to see how the logistics of such an approach will work.
Would kids attending school on the other side of their designated region have to be driven there by parents or drive themselves? Or would every neighborhood be crisscrossed by buses going hither and yon? Isn't that one of the complaints about the current assignment system, with the choices it offers among neighborhood schools, magnet schools and schools on different calendars?
The reason the board is going to these lengths is that it has revoked an assignment model that has tried to keep schools throughout the county more or less balanced in their enrollment of students from low-income backgrounds.
The new approach risks having some schools attended mostly by kids whose families struggle with poverty - which typically makes it more difficult for them to succeed. Members of the board's 5-4 majority that abandoned the diversity policy say the right things in terms of their concern about poor kids' underperformance - indisputably a problem - but their neighborhood-schools remedy amounts to letting blood when a sick person needs antibiotics.
The board is supposed to be considering community feedback on its zones proposal, and already there is plenty. For example, it's been pointed out that some zones lack calendar options. And the fate of magnet schools, which are used to promote diversity, appears up in the air.
What's most significant, however, is that the zone approach moves away from Wake's time-tested emphasis on equality of resources and opportunity throughout its school system. A sorting out according to class and income will be hard to avoid - and it's not too complicated to figure out who will end up being hurt.
