Court rules against schools
Decision means parental consent is needed before putting new students in year-round classes
Published: Thu, Jun. 28, 2007 12:00AM
Modified Thu, Jun. 28, 2007 03:23AM
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closeStudents moving into the Wake County school system won't be required to attend year-round schools without parental consent, the N.C. Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday.
The court denied the Wake County Board of Education's second request for a stay. If granted, the stay would have allowed the district to assign students to year-round or traditional schools based on space.
Having the stay denied means the district must continue to have parental consent as it has been required to do since May.
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Last week, the courts denied the district's first request for a temporary, emergency stay.
"This is going to make our student assignment plan and balancing of crowding more difficult," school board member Carol Parker said.
Board members were hoping the second request would be granted. It would have given the district leverage to assign new students to year-round or modified calendar schools. The district is projecting more than 8,000 new students to be added to classroom rosters in the fall.
Already, the school district has seen more than 2,600 families reject the year-round calendar after a judge's ruling in May forced Wake to send out consent forms to the parents of more than 30,000 students.
School leaders have said giving traditional-calendar options to those families has increased crowding and boosted the percentage of low-income students at those schools.
Patrice Lee, co-founder of the parent advocacy group Wake CARES, which sued the school district over mandatory year-round schools, said she wasn't surprised the stay was denied.
"They were banking on the stay and banking on the appeal, and they're not really banking on what they actually have," Lee said. "We didn't see any reason for the stay."
The school board is still planning to appeal the May ruling, which came from Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning Jr. A decision from the higher courts on the full appeal is likely to take several months.
Staff writer Kinea White Epps can be reached at 836-4952 or kinea.white@newsobserver.com.
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