Wake County weighs role of multi-track year-round schools

Multi-track year-round schools were once hailed as Wake County’s savior for dealing with growth, but now school leaders are unsure how large a role they’ll play in the district’s future.

Wake more than doubled the number of multi-track schools in the mid-to-late 2000s, accepting the higher cost of operating the schools in return for the construction savings gained from the model’s increased building capacity. Students are split into four groups that follow their own schedules and keep the campus in use all 12 months.

But now the majority of multi-track schools are under capacity, with the lack of students causing some schools to need more money to provide basic educational programs.

Wake has cut back on the number of multi-track schools, going from 51 in 2009 to 38 now. With more cuts being considered, some school leaders say the district is in danger of crippling the multi-track program.

“We need to deal with the fact that the year-round schools are underutilized,” school board member Bill Fletcher said at the June 16 board meeting. “Conversion away from the multi-track program is not the answer to improve utilization of the schools.

“We need to recruit people and have them participate willingly and excitedly about what’s available through the year-round program.”

But some in the community say that the district needs to instead address the continued lack of traditional-calendar seats in parts of the county.

“I understand that some families enjoy year-round,” said Anna Johnson, a Cary parent. “I don’t advocate we convert all schools to traditional. But we need to have more traditional seats, especially in middle schools.”

The multi-track program was more popular a decade ago, but posed a different set of problems for the school district.

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, attendance was mainly by application. Demand far exceeded supply for the much smaller number of multi-track schools.

But while most of them were over-enrolled, school leaders were also concerned they had much lower percentage of students receiving federally subsidized lunches than the rest of the county.

Then in 2006, the school system began a mass expansion in the year-round program in expectation of massive growth. But slower-than-expected growth during the recession, opposition from parents and a lawsuit kept many of the new and converted multi-track schools below their projected enrollments.

“Nationwide, any time that districts are mandating multi-track year-round, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep parents actively desiring it,” said school board Vice Chairman Tom Benton, a former principal of a multi-track school. “In districts where it stays voluntary, it stays popular.

“As we increased the number of schools that were multi-track and, in essence, made it mandatory for a large number of families, scheduling issues eroded the support of it.”

The lack of support has caused problems for schools because they get teachers based on how many students they have. Four multi-track schools are so under-enrolled that the district is providing extra funding to avoid situations such as having to combine students from different grade levels in the same class.

Cathy Moore, deputy superintendent for school performance, said it’s especially hard for the under-enrolled multi-track middle schools to provide the courses their students want.

“You have students choosing art and other electives,” Moore said. “It just becomes tougher to ensure you have them on all four tracks.”

Following the close of classes Tuesday, Wakefield Elementary in North Raleigh becomes the ninth multi-track school since 2009 to switch to a traditional calendar. Wakefield was among the schools converted in 2007 to the year-round calendar.

Wakefield Principal Victoria Privott said it will be easier for teachers to do joint planning now that they’re all on the same schedule. Privott said the change will also address the concerns that parents had about having children on different calendars because of older siblings at traditional-calendar middle schools and high schools.

“Year-round can work, but the traditional calendar will produce a better environment for us,” she said.

Other calendar changes are in store in Wake County.

Alston Ridge Elementary in Cary will become a multi-track school in July. But two Raleigh multi-track schools – Barwell Road and Wilburn elementary schools – could switch to a type of single-track year-round in 2016 pending a recommendation from school administration.

Administrators do plan to recommend at the July 21 board meeting that Highcroft Drive Elementary in Cary switch from single-track year-round to the traditional calendar in 2016.

Administrators had also considered recommending switching Salem elementary and middle schools in Apex from multi-track to the traditional calendar in 2016. But the staff now plans to wait a year before potentially recommending the switch be made in 2017.

Fletcher, the school board member, said he supports waiting until next year to revisit the Salem conversions.

“My fear was that that conversion would basically collapse the multi-track program in western Wake County, and I don’t think we can afford to do that from a capacity standpoint or from a political standpoint,” he said.

But Johnson, the Cary parent, is hoping to persuade the board to act on July 21 to convert the Salem schools. She notes the district’s own data showing traditional-calendar schools in western Wake are over-capacity while the area’s year-round schools are under-enrolled.

“There needs to be a legitimate choice in the area, and that’s not the case,” she said. “Too many families are being turned away. That’s not an option.”

This story was originally published June 28, 2015 at 3:14 PM with the headline "Wake County weighs role of multi-track year-round schools."