RALEIGH -- In a northern chunk of Wake County, where bustling shopping centers and apartment complexes give way to affluent subdivisions and the banks of Falls Lake, voters will make a decision that could have a far-reaching impact on the county's 146,000 public schoolchildren.
After two years of protests and partisan votes and bickering and budget woes, the Wake County school board's future is in the hands of District 3 voters, who will cast a tie-breaker vote on Nov. 8. The runoff between Democratic incumbent Kevin Hill and Republican challenger Heather Losurdo will decide the political tilt of the board that oversees North Carolina's largest school system.
In the next two weeks, residents of this district will be unable to avoid the issue. They will be bombarded with mailers, campaign ads and robocalls. And they'll get another dose of the rhetoric that is woven into the fabric of the Wake schools fight over where children go to school: Neighborhood schools. Diversity. School choice. Busing.
Voters aren't exactly excited to be at the epicenter of the battle.
"I kind of get numb to it," says Angie Blum, a mother of two Wake students and a human resources manager for Cisco Systems.
District 3 is a large rectangular swath stretching from the Millbrook area south of Interstate 540, north to the county line. It includes established communities such as North Ridge and Millbrook and newer neighborhoods such as Bedford and Wakefield.
In many ways, the district's candidates and voters represent the polar views of school board members and voters across the county.
Hill, a longtime educator, opposed the school choice assignment plan recently enacted by the board's GOP majority; he wants to prevent concentrations of too many low-performing students. Losurdo, a relative newcomer, supports the choice plan after initially suggesting it be delayed.
District 3 voters are similarly divided. Some generally like the school system the way it is. Some want to see big changes like those proposed by the Republican board majority. Others are simply weary of the dissension.
All a parent wants
It's early evening at the Lee Brothers Tae Kwon Do studio off Falls of Neuse Road. Parents crowd into the waiting room, as children work their way through kicks and moves. Blum works on her laptop as she waits for her boys, who proudly don yellow belts.
Blum is an undecided voter. She has lived in Pennsylvania, California, even in the United Kingdom. But she has never been anyplace where she has heard nonstop news about school board politics.
She's not into the partisan fights. Both sides make valid points, she says.
While she's not so caught up in worries about student assignment, some of her neighbors are fleeing Wake schools. Co-workers have moved to Chapel Hill.
She knows a family whose children got shifted to three different schools in three years; the kids now go to Ravenscroft, a private school.
Blum has chosen to stick with the public schools, for now.
"My kids are happy, and the teachers we have are very good," she says of her sons' experience at Pleasant Union Elementary. "Ultimately that's the thing that's most critical to the kids and the parents."
The balancing point
Last week, the school board passed a school choice assignment plan due to take effect next fall. The plan, put forth by Superintendent Tony Tata, moves away from Wake's previous policy of factoring in socioeconomic status to diversify the schools.
The vote came after two years of debate and divisiveness. In 2009, Republicans took control of the board and last year abolished the policy of assigning students partly based on family income.
Last week's vote also came days after Democratic-supported candidates grabbed four seats in an election seen by some as a backlash to the Republican-led policies. Chairman Ron Margiotta lost his seat. Hill was just shy of gaining the majority of the votes - in a field of four - that he needed to avoid a runoff. So the nine-member board is left evenly split with four Democrats and four Republicans.
The winner of the District 3 runoff - Hill or Losurdo - will determine whether Republicans hang onto control or whether the board flips back to the Democrats. And the outcome could mean yet more changes to the assignment plan.
Of Wake's nine school districts, District 3 happens to be the most evenly split along party lines. Democrats make up 36.2 percent of the nearly 70,000 voters, while Republicans comprise 35.9 percent. In 2008, a majority of District 3 voted for Democrat Barack Obama for president, Republican Pat McCrory for governor and Republican Richard Burr for U.S. Senate.
Against long bus rides
Just off Schoolhouse Street in Wakefield, Michelle Moore and her husband walk their dogs near their home. A few blocks away, the Wakefield High football team practices in a cool drizzle.
The Moore children attend the Wakefield elementary and middle schools adjacent to the high school. They're not likely to be reassigned, but Michelle Moore is philosophically opposed to busing.
"It would be really silly to remove kids who walk to school," says Moore, who describes herself as a friend of Losurdo. "In other words, I'm not really into busing. ... I feel that they need to make all schools better rather than move kids down to somewhere else and bring kids here. It's exhausting for them to be on a bus for that long."
Moore is sometimes frustrated with crowding in the fast-growing Wakefield schools. "I don't like that my daughter is in a trailer with 31 kids," she says. On the other hand, she says, her children have had a great experience overall, and they haven't encountered bullying.
South of Wakefield, cars snake slowly in the late afternoon traffic jam on Falls of Neuse Road. Orange construction barrels line the road, and a school bus inches along in the middle of a line of cars.
Voices on the street
In North Ridge, a young couple takes a walk after work. They admit they haven't paid too much attention the school board's conflicts. Their "children," they say, are two Labrador mixes.
Tyler Morgan, an engineer with Duke Energy, didn't vote in the local election in October; he probably won't make it to the polls for next month's runoff, either.
But he generally believes that neighborhood schools are better, from a practical standpoint. "I know diversity is important," he says. "But it seems like you could achieve that with neighborhood schools."
At the Starbucks on Six Forks Road, Jonah Vincent sits down for coffee with fellow musician Ricardo James. They're in a band call the Beatnam Vets, a hip hop group.
Vincent is a product of Wake County schools. He attended Carroll Middle School and Sanderson High, where he graduated in 2001. He went on to N.C. Central University.
He believes the Wake schools prepared him well.
"Education is about more than reading a book," he said. "It's about how (students) are able to interact in the world, with different people and different situations. I had friends whose parents owned golf homes and friends who lived in Chavis Heights (public housing). Everybody was cool with each other."
Vincent doesn't understand why the school board wanted to shake up a system that worked. He points out that parent surveys showed high satisfaction ratings with the schools.
Neighborhood school advocates are more worried about who's being bused rather than busing itself, Vincent says. "They're like, 'We don't want to bring in those poor kids.' "
Not far away, the carpool line stalls outside West Millbrook Middle School. There, Amy Wilson sips a hot drink in her Honda Odyssey before picking up her seventh-grade son. Her daughter is a fourth grader at Baileywick Road Elementary.
Wilson considers herself an involved parent. She goes to meetings and she's spent months learning Tata's strategy for assigning students. At first she was opposed to the plan.
"I was against letting go of having a school attached to a property," she says. "I think that's going to be hard for people to understand."
But she came around. "I believe in what Tata's doing, in that he still wants an element of busing and I think that's essential," says Wilson, who plans to vote for Hill.
In the 'rim schools'
The assignment plan includes achievement as a small element of the equation, which could help prevent the concentration of too many low-performing students in some schools. Hill wants to make achievement a bigger part of the formula, equal to proximity.
In the plan, families would be given a list of at least five elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools according to proximity to their homes. Families would then choose; Tata has estimated that 85 percent will get their top pick.
Wilson worries that the so-called "rim schools" such as West Millbrook are neglected and under-enrolled, while the county spends money to build new schools that quickly become crowded. Magnet schools also get plenty of attention, she says.
"Every school in Wake County should be dynamic," she says. "I get frustrated that my child gets one elective per semester."
She doesn't want to see District 3 swayed by outsiders who will try to influence the runoff. She worries that the newly adopted assignment plan could be changed, causing more confusion and upheaval for families.
"The political nature of the board keeps us from moving in one direction or another," she says. "There's so much need in the schools, and we're just not talking about that."
Staff researcher David Raynor contributed to this report.
