To invoke a seasonal metaphor as the Cardinals and Rangers do World Series battle: For the Wake County schools it's a brand-new ballgame.
In the space of a little less than two weeks, it has become clear that the school board will proceed under new leadership. Chairman Ron Margiotta of Apex, the retired businessman who has been a voice for disaffected suburban parents during eight years on the board, was told by the voters that his services were no longer needed.
This was not a case of voters in Raleigh ditching Margiotta because they didn't think he was looking out for their interests. No, because school board members are chosen district by district, by the voters who live there, this was a case of Margiotta being repudiated by his own southwest Wake neighbors.
Accountant Susan Evans, who got 52 percent of the vote to Margiotta's 48 percent, hardly scored a landslide. But it had to rate as an upset, given Margiotta's tenure, his visibility and the tendency of voters in that part of the county to swing Republican - the party that two years ago inserted itself into Wake school politics in a big way and that embraced Margiotta as a hero.
Margiotta had mused publicly about not running for a third four-year term. But he decided to give it another go as the board struggled to follow through on the agenda that had put him in the chairman's seat.
The agenda was neighborhood schools. Margiotta, perhaps hearkening back to the teeny-tiny suburban school districts in New Jersey, such as the one whose board he headed for a time in the 1970s, had long made it clear that if he had his druthers, his section of Wake County would have its own schools reserved for its own residents.
He wanted to insulate those residents from what he saw as overbearing school board policies that too often required students to be shuffled off to different schools and that also, in some cases, sent students from poorer Raleigh neighborhoods to schools in his district.
To be sure, they didn't do it that way in New Jersey, where towns and their school districts are likely to be stratified by class and hence also by race, given the average income gap between whites and blacks.
Those themes resonated with Wake Republicans, who two years ago got behind a slate of four candidates who vowed that they'd ignore diversity in deciding where kids went to school and would keep them close to home.
That platform did the trick, and soon Margiotta was installed as chairman, with north Raleigh's Kevin Hill demoted. The new majority charged ahead, convinced against the evidence that they had a county-wide mandate. Superintendent Del Burns decided he'd had enough.
Wake found itself in an uncomfortable spotlight. Republicans were trying to dismantle one of the nation's notable efforts to prevent schools where concentrated poverty made academic success even harder to achieve. But after a few months of wheel-spinning and as community criticism grew louder, the board majority's attempt to draw neighborhood attendance zones bogged down.
Send in the Marines, or in this case retired Army Brig. Gen. Tony Tata - newly minted as a superintendent, not shy about his Republican leanings and no doubt seen as a good ideological fit by the school board's controlling bloc.
Taking office not quite nine months ago, Tata got to work trying to repair Humpty-Dumpty. And darned if he didn't make a pretty good show of it. After a round of outreach sessions to get his bearings, he came out for a "controlled choice" approach to student assignment.
That approach, favored by Wake's business community (which rightly feared that a straight-up neighborhood schools plan would create high-poverty failure factories), had been spurned by Margiotta when it was first floated. Now it became the board majority's default option. What did that signal about how they figured it would actually work?
Tata insisted that the plan had to be approved on the double if it was to kick in for the next school year. So on Tuesday, lame duck Margiotta put it to a vote. It cleared the board, 6-2 - but with some notable opposition. Because, in the same election that had cost the chairman his seat, it became clear that many folks who had a chance to vote this year were turned off by what he and his party were doing and how they were doing it.
Candidates backed by big-spending local Democrats (the virus of misplaced partisanship being highly contagious) came out on top. That included Kevin Hill, who wanted the Tata plan to be kept in the oven until it was fully baked. In a four-way race, Hill couldn't quite avoid a Nov. 8 runoff with Republican Heather Losurdo.
Hill calls the new assignment plan a good one but says there are some issues to resolve. He has a sharp eye for the plan's soft spots. Send him to the plate again, and he could give this ballgame a happy ending.
