RALEIGH -- Don't look for the Wake County school system to tell federal civil rights investigators how many students were bused in the past for socioeconomic diversity.
In information released Wednesday in response to a public records request, Wake school officials said they were unable to determine how many students were assigned for diversity under the old policy that sought to limit the percentages of low-income students in individual schools.
"While it is certainly possible that [socioeconomic status]-diversity played a greater role in staffs' decision to recommend some node moves as compared to others, there is no data set that would readily identify such nodes," wrote Ann Majestic, the school board's attorney, in response to the federal request for the data.
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights asked for the busing information as part of its probe into the school board's elimination of the use of diversity in student assignment. Acting on a complaint from the NAACP, federal investigators will be back in Raleigh on April 6-7 to interview school board members.
The NAACP is accusing Wake of racial discrimination for the school board's decision last May to drop the use of socioeconomic diversity as a factor in student assignment in favor of moving toward neighborhood schools.
Best guess: 5,900-plus
School officials have been historically reluctant to place exact numbers or percentages on how many students were bused for diversity. Supporters of the old policy would argue that the percentage was very low. They attribute reassignment primarily to growth and not diversity.
"The vast majority of moves were made because of growth and opening of new schools," said school board member Kevin Hill. "I can't say that enough."
Education consultant Michael Alves released a report last month estimating that at least 5,900 students - or 4 percent of Wake's total student enrollment of 143,289 - are assigned to schools for diversity. Alves was hired by the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and the Wake Education Partnership to develop a new assignment model that uses student achievement to prevent schools from having too many low-performing students.
School board member John Tedesco argued that Alves' figure, based primarily on students bused out of Southeast Raleigh, is too low and doesn't take into account all the students in other parts of Wake who are bused for diversity. He said the lack of specific numbers about how many students were bused for diversity shows how flawed the policy had become.
"There was no very good measure of what was being implemented," Tedesco said, "so that those who made up a figure had a hard time defending it when it was being challenged."
Only way is forward
Whether the state's largest school district could go back to the old diversity policy was thrown into doubt last week when Wake released correspondence from the U.S. Department of Agriculture saying that free and reduced lunch data can't be used for student assignment.
Wake had used the school lunch data for a decade as a way to try to keep schools from having too many poor children. That measure replaced a previous policy that tried to balance enrollment based on race.
A new staff-led student assignment task force announced this week by Superintendent Tony Tata hopes to present a plan to the school board by late spring.
Among the possibilities that the six-member task force will look at is the Alves plan and the plan that Tedesco had been working on that would have divided Wake into 16 community assignment zones.
"We're going to come up with the best plan that we can that satisfies the board and that satisfies the community," Tata said in a news release.
