srocco@newsobserver.com
New Wake County Schools Superintendent Tony Tata has lunch with Carnage Middle School students on his first day on the job.
RALEIGH -- Wake County schools Superintendent Tony Tata and his staff have spent months crafting a plan to determine where the district's students will attend school in the 2012-13 year, but controversy over the document appears to be far from over.
Key elements of the plan remain to be decided. So during the next two months, the 14 candidates campaigning for five board seats will likely engage in charged discussions about the plan while it's still in progress.
Tata said he'll share elements of the plan with school board members Tuesday. Under the developing plan, parents will choose among several nearby schools, at least one magnet school and an "achievement" school, or higher-performing facility usually located in a relatively affluent area.
Already, the debate has begun. Tata and school board Chairman Ron Margiotta hold different positions on the use of achievement schools as a means to even out opportunity for all students.
Margiotta said Friday that he opposes the achievement school approach. He called it a version of Wake's former policies of sending students from low-performing schools to distant schools with better track records.
"What we are attempting to do is bring forth an assignment plan that's satisfactory to the community," Margiotta said. "If it's not, I'm not going to support it.
"I have a problem with setting aside any seats for achievement," he continued. "It's substituting achievement for race, or economics."
And if relying on proximity results in high concentrations of low-income students, how would the system deal with that?
"It's sad if we say that every school in the county is not an achievement school," Margiotta said. "Some of the schools in my district are non-achieving, and I want to know why."
Margiotta, an Apex resident who represents District 8, will be the only member of the school board's controlling coalition up for re-election on Oct. 11. He and Christine Kushner, a candidate forCarolyn Morrison's former District 6 seat, said the issue of achievement schools will likely figure in campaign discussions.
"Surely there will be controversy over the achievement schools," said Kushner, who has been an active school system volunteer and parent. "Achievement needs to be a factor in student assignment."
What comes next
Steps in the coming process involve the board's own tweaking of details of the plan, getting comment from the public at hearings, adding up transportation costs under different versions and communicating enough information to give families the best use of the choices offered.
"We are at the beginning of a community conversation about student assignment," said Kushner, a proponent of the former diversity-based assignment plan. "I think an election is an appropriate time to do it."
Decisions also remain about to handle admissions to the system's popular magnet schools, and how to set up feeder patterns, or paths of schools that students in given areas could follow from kindergarten through high school.
"We have a draft list of feeder patterns," Tata said. "We know that there are several that are contentious."
Members of the task force have found that the traditional feeder patterns that some families may have followed for years sometimes send students to schools more distant than other schools they might attend.
Attraction to magnets
The choice system will likely affect populations at the system's popular magnet schools. Students who live near magnets such as Enloe High School and Fuller Elementary School may choose to attend them in greater numbers. That means room will have to be found in already crowded suburban schools for students who have been commuting to the magnets.
Magnet schools, which are mostly near downtown Raleigh, were designed to shore up attendance in low-income neighborhoods by drawing from schools all over the county with special course offerings.
Division among the Republican-backed members of the board derailed a previous zone-based plan in 2010, leading to Tata's shouldering of the process.
Even if the current board were to approve a plan before the Oct. 11 elections, voters' choices about the contested seats could lead to further alterations.
"If we stay focused on the students, irrespective of what might change politically, we'll be in a good place," Tata said. "At the end of the day, everyone recognizes that all students deserve access to a high quality education."
