The next Wake schools superintendent repeatedly told leaders of the African-American community something they wanted to hear Saturday: that he values diversity.
Anthony J. Tata declined, though, to say that he would ensure that Wake's schools have diverse student bodies, nor did he dispel suspicions among some that he been handpicked by the school board's five-member Republican majority to help resegregate the school system.
Tata won positive reviews from liberals and conservatives alike during his flurry of appearances at schools and at meetings of elected officials and civic groups last week.
And Saturday he even won a standing ovation from most of the audience after coming across as a champion of diversity.
Still, his performance wasn't enough to assuage doubts of many there who remained skeptical of Tata's bosses on the county school board.
"The gang of five brought him in here to carry out the wishes of the board," said the Rev. Earl. C. Johnson. "That's what superintendents do, right?"
Johnson said Tata's statements Saturday conflicted with the attitudes about upholding diversity held by school board leaders such as John Tedesco and Ron Margiotta.
"I've never heard them even use the word, and if they did, it was negative, yet he comes in here and says 'diversity, diversity, diversity,'" Johnson said. "So I've got to say, 'Wait a minute, that's not what your board is saying sir, how are you going to carry that out?'"
Tata was speaking on the third and final day of a dizzying first public tour of the county, to a group of about 30 elected officials, clergy and others at St. Matthews AME church. Democratic school board member Keith Sutton had invited Tata.
The audience included some of the staunchest opponents of the Republican majority's decision last year to end Wake's policy of assigning students to schools to maintain socio-economic diversity.
The Republican board members picked Tata, who is the chief operating officer of the Washington, D.C., school system, a retired Army brigadier general and sometime conservative pundit.
His appearances on the conservative Fox network, Washington Post columns and Internet postings - including one in which he said former Alaska governor Sarah Palin would make a better president than Barack Obama - stirred concern among liberals and supporters of the diversity policy.
But many at the meeting Saturday said they were pleased not just with his support for diversity, but also his vows to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to ensure that every one of the system's 143,000 students would have proper teachers and resources.
Tata told the group that he had attended diverse schools himself, and that as an Army officer and then an executive for the Washington, D.C., school system, he had always assembled diverse leadership teams. He urged them to judge him for his actions after he starts the job rather than by preconceptions.
Gathering information
Sutton, the school board member, said he took Tata at his word that he hadn't made up his mind on how to handle the issue of diversity.
"I don't think he has an agenda at this point; I think he's still trying to gather information at this point and listen to the different factions in the community," Sutton said. "I think he sees himself as someone who can bring people together, and so I think he's on a fact-finding mission and looking to see how he can do that."
Tata said it was important to give black and Hispanic students role models by making sure teaching and administration teams were diverse. He said it may be a good idea for the system to work harder to recruit teachers from historically black colleges and universities.
Mary Yarborough of Garner, who has worked for the school system 40 years, including 25 as a teacher, told him that was fine, but it wasn't the same as giving students a diverse group of peers.
"Diversity means mixing," she said. "We want to mix the staff, but let's don't forget, let's mix the students, too.
"You cannot get good results going back to a totally black situation over here, or a totally white situation over there," she said.
Other members of the audience told Tata that part of the push for neighborhood schools comes from white parents who don't want black students in schools they regard as theirs.
'Neighborhood schools'
One older speaker said that Tata needed to understand that for those who attended school in Wake before desegregation, "neighborhood schools" for black kids meant dirt playing fields and hand-me-down used textbooks sent when white schools got new books.
Tata pledged that, no matter what happened, such inequities wouldn't happen on his watch.
"It's all about resources to me," he said. "I don't intend to go from a very good school system to a struggling school system.
"As I take in all these things and figure out what direction I want to go and make my recommendations to the board, we'll see," Tata said. "What I can guarantee is, I will ensure that the schools are resourced at the expense of everything else."
He had met in closed session with the school board Friday. Sutton said in an interview Saturday that it had been a "come to Jesus" meeting in which board members raised concerns about Tata's outside work.
Tata had assured the board that he would be careful about outside work, Sutton said.
Tata has said in interviews that he would stop his work as a pundit and become "apolitical," focusing entirely on the school system.
Sutton said that Tata hadn't promised the board that he would stop his outside work, but had assured them he would use good judgment.
