Schools relax goals on student diversity

As the number of low-income students soars, the system finds it hard to spread them evenly among the schools. Now, up to half of a school's students may come from low-income families

RALEIGH -- Wake County is relaxing its nationally recognized student diversity policy because its schools are having a harder time meeting the program's goals.

School leaders plan to raise the ceiling for the percentage of low-income students at each school from 40 percent to 50 percent. Overnight, more than two dozen schools which were out of compliance with the district's policy will be OK under the new policy.

The diversity policy, which has been held up as a national model, is based on the premise that schools with a diverse population perform better. Some worry that simply raising the cap will encourage the district to ignore schools that would have been out of compliance under the old rules.

"We are not going to forget these schools," said Chuck Dulaney, assistant superintendent for growth and planning.

School board chairwoman Rosa Gill said the board is scheduled to vote on the change next week.

School leaders say they must change the policy because of the rising number of low-income students in the district. When the 40 percent goal was adopted in 2000, 25 percent of elementary students were receiving subsidized lunches. That number is projected to reach 35 percent this fall.

"The guideline that is being proposed is a reflection of the reality we're now facing," said Superintendent Del Burns.

Since 2000, the number of schools above the 40 percent goal has increased from seven to as many as 51 of the 149 schools this year. Raising the bar to 50 percent would cut the projected number of schools out of compliance by more than half to 24 schools.

Critics contend the new policy is only meant to make the district look better.

"They've gotten a lot of mileage out of this, but they've never successfully implemented it," said Dave Duncan, president of Assignment By Choice, a parent group which has criticized Wake's assignment policies.

The school board adopted the economic diversity policy in 2000 out of fears, later justified by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, that it would be difficult to legally defend the use of race in student assignment.

The board based the policy on research that shows that academic performance suffers when more than half the students at a school are poor. Gill, who was on the board in 2000, said officials set the goal at 40 percent instead of 50 percent because the district's percentage of poor students then was low.

Most school districts in the Triangle and the nation have abandoned diversity policies.

For instance, since Durham abandoned diversity efforts, the gap in the poverty levels between schools has soared. This past school year, several Durham schools had more than 80 percent of their students receiving subsidized lunches and one school had more than 90 percent.

Wake is the largest district in the nation to strive for diversity based on family income. The district has been singled out by the U.S. Education Department as a role model for integration. Wake regularly receives visitors from around the country and internationally to see how the diversity policy is used. As recently as last week, a newspaper reporter from the Netherlands came to Wake to learn about the program.

But Wake has found it increasingly hard to keep schools diverse as the district has experienced record growth. Wake has picked up more than 29,000 students in the past five years. Many of those new students are poor.

This fall, as many as 10 schools are projected to have low-income populations of more than 60 percent of the students.

"What we're saying is it's more realistic because we've got so many schools in the 60s," Gill said. "Bringing it 10 percent down is more realistic than bringing it 20 percent down."

Gill said many schools with between 40 percent and 50 percent of their students receiving subsidized lunches are doing well academically.

A plea for fairness

Anne Courie-Meulink, PTA president at Stough Elementary in North Raleigh, said she hopes Wake won't forget about schools with low-income populations in the 40s.

She complained that Stough is projected to have a low-income population that is more than double those of two schools, Brier Creek and Lacy, which draw students from the same area.

"I understood that distributing students equitably would diversify the schools, but students aren't being equitably distributed," Courie-Meulink said.

Duncan said the diversity policy is a "noble instinct," but one which the school district has failed to follow. "It's a catastrophe," he said.

Gill and Burns argued that the schools would be even less diverse if not for the policy.

Richard Kahlenberg, a Washington-based researcher for the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy research group which supports using economic diversity policies, wasn't worried about the pending change.

Kahlenberg said setting the new ceiling at 50 percent is consistent with the academic research. He said he would have been worried if Wake had raised it to as high as 75 percent.

"If other districts felt the policy was being completely disregarded, that would be a problem," Kahlenberg said. "But that doesn't seem to be happening. Wake is far more integrated than many other districts. Shifting from 40 percent to 50 percent is a reasonable change."