How tight are Wake schools?

Staff, critics read the data differently

It seems a simple thing to assess: A school system has a certain number of students and a certain number of seats.

Is it overcrowded or not?

But as Wake County schools scramble to accommodate up to 8,000 extra students a year, that simple assessment has become a hotly disputed calculation.

School officials say only the expanded use of a year-round calendar can create enough capacity to keep up with growth.

Opponents of converting 22 schools to a year-round schedule this summer see thousands of unused seats.

Of Wake's 141 schools, 52 are below capacity, but the extra space includes seats made available through trailers and the conversion of non-classroom space to classrooms. Other schools are hundreds of students above capacity. Overall, the system of 128,072 students has 403 extra seats this year.

It's a small percentage, but critics of year-round conversion such as Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly say the presence of any empty seats undercuts the claim of overflowing schools.

"The school system would have the capacity if they just use every seat," he said.

School officials say adjusting school populations is more complex than counting heads and counting seats. There are issues of geography and diversity, plus preparing for the next wave of new arrivals.

For instance, they say, getting students from the crowded western parts of the county to eastern areas where there are seats would require longer bus rides for children and more reassignments than parents would tolerate.

And some of the excess capacity will be soon be gone. Schools with capacity are about to be engulfed by fast-growing subdivisions nearby.

"We're trying to stay ahead of the growth," said Chuck Dulaney, assistant superintendent for growth and planning.

Year-round opponents think the school system should be pressing for full capacity.

"If we're in a crisis mode, you should look at what really needs to be in place," said Dave Duncan, co-founder of the parent group Stop Mandatory Year-Round. "There is so much capacity around."

Some opponents think school system leaders have declared a space crisis because they see the year-round calendar as a better way to educate children and want it to spread across the system.

"They [school leaders] want to be able to show to others that a large district can make year-round work when it has failed elsewhere," Duncan said.

School leaders say there is no hidden agenda.

Rather, they say, their assessment of crowding reflects how space really works in a school system. First, students are not assigned to seats; neighborhoods are assigned to schools. That means some excesses and overloads are inevitable as some neighborhoods have more children than others.

More fundamentally, they say, capacity itself is a fluid term, "Campus capacity" refers to all possible seats, including trailers and converted storage areas. "Permanent capacity" means the number of seats that a building was designed to provide given the limits for its cafeteria, media center, parking and other elements.

The school district is at 99.7 percent of campus capacity, and at 119.9 percent of permanent capacity. Although the district factors in trailers to determine crowding and student assignment, Dulaney said that measure understates just how packed the schools have become.

"We should be reducing our reliance on mobile classrooms, but we're not doing that," he said.

Other crowded school systems avoid debate over capacity by talking only about building capacity. Those school districts say the inflated space created by trailers and other add-ons isn't a true measure.