Parents protest school plan

Frustrated Wake County parents greeted today's release of the student reassignment plan with pickets and protests.

This afternoon, school board members will find out school administrators' plan for which neighborhoods will go to different schools in the fall. They'll be watched by parents who are holding two protests to a version of the plan released last month that called for moving 6,432 elementary students.

"The parents want to do something to show they're concerned," said Lisa Phillips, who helped organize today's protest by families at Davis Drive Elementary School in Cary. "We want to be heard."

Phillips said parents and students were expected to walk to Davis Drive this morning to protest a proposal to remove 260 students.

Later in the day, another group of parents, mostly from Oak Grove Elementary School in Cary, will hold a silent protest outside the school district's administrative offices. They are complaining that the draft proposal would move them from their neighborhood school.

Wake annually reassigns thousands of students to fill new schools, ease crowding at existing schools and promote diversity. Wake tries to limit the percentage of low-income students at each school based on research showing that all students suffer academically when a school has too many poor children.

What's made the latest round of reassignments even more contentious is the school board's decision in December to revise its student assignment policy. Now the board requires neighboring schools to have similar student enrollments.

That policy change was reflected in the draft plan released last month, where administrators estimated that 20 percent of the moves were diversity-related.

School board members say the strongest opposition to the proposal has come from parents at three Cary elementary schools, Davis Drive, Farmington Woods and Oak Grove. The draft plan would have moved students to more distant schools to better balance the percentage of low-income students at schools in western Wake.

"The issue is not about diversity," said Julie Huffman, whose children could be reassigned from Oak Grove. "I want my property values to remain where they are."

There will be three public hearings before the school board votes Feb. 5.