Wake has magnet schools not seen in smaller systems. But is the district too big?
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- Wake began its magnet program in 1982 and it has grown to more than 50 schools.
- Wake’s magnet themes draw students countywide and helped integrate the district.
- Wake’s 857‑square‑mile district and 160,000 students prompt debate about size.
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50 years of Wake County Public Schools
On July 1, 1976, Raleigh City Schools and the old Wake County school system faded into the history books. Enter the unified Wake County Public School System, which 50 years later, is the biggest school system in North Carolina and the 14th largest nationally. But the district faces new challenges in 2026: both crowded schools and under-enrollment, plus major competition from other education options.
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Merging the Wake County and Raleigh City Schools helped desegregate the two districts in 1976, but it took the magnet school program to integrate the unified school district.
In 1982, Wake began the program — which still exists today — of a network of magnet schools with unique academic offerings to attract families to campuses that might otherwise be empty or almost exclusively minority. There are now over 50 magnet schools offering more than 30 different themes, such as world language, technology, arts and engineering.
“The merger created the system, the magnets made it work,” said Keith Poston, president of the WakeEd Partnership, in an interview with The News & Observer. “It created a unified county — not a unified school system but a county — that was committed to strong public schools.”
The WakeEd Partnership was formed by the business community in 1983 to help support the school district, including the newly formed magnet schools.
Wake’s magnet school program annually wins national awards and draws visits from educators from other states.
“The merger and being able to offer all of these unique programs is an important piece of our history as North Carolinians,” said Amy Wilkinson, the magnet program coordinator at Washington Elementary School in Raleigh. “We were one of the first school districts that set up an idea of magnet schools like they are today. We continue to have people who come and model their districts after us.”
Unique offerings at magnet schools
Critics of the magnet school program say it’s taking away resources that should be offered to more schools. But supporters say Wake County’s size allows it to offer the programming found in magnet schools.
The school district made more than $15 million in cuts to next school year’s budget, including reducing the number of assistant principal positions in high schools. Wake uses federal grants to start new magnet programs and is required to use local dollars to keep them running after the grant money ends.
“I’m from a small town,” Kimberli Jackson, the AVID program coordinator at East Wake High School in Wendell, said in an interview. “We didn’t have magnet schools where I’m from. So when I got here, my kids were afforded that opportunity. My son’s been playing violin for eight years because he was in a magnet school.”
Washington Elementary has a catalog of more than 200 electives under its gifted and talented magnet theme. It’s the kind of offerings that Catie Burnette, the school’s principal, wished she had when she was an elementary school student.
“Sometimes I’ll be in a class for an observation, and I find myself walking away from my computer and then, next thing you know, I’m on the floor controlling a robot with a second-grader,” Burnette said in an interview. “Or I’m painting in an art class, because it is so engaging. I think that is a huge part of what draws people.”
Washington was the first public high school for Raleigh’s Black students when it opened in 1924. Now it’s among the former Raleigh City Schools that has a new lease on life through the magnet school program.
Washington draws magnet applications from students in 50 different elementary schools — from Morrisville to Fuquay-Varina. The magnet students attend classes with the neighborhood children who live near the school, which is on Fayetteville Street south of downtown Raleigh.
“Wake County has never shied from that original intent of what our magnets were intended to do,” said Wake school board chair Tyler Swanson. “What we’re able to do is to bring families together that may not live in the same communities, but have the same goal of ensuring that all kids have access to the best education. Our magnet themes allow those students to coexist and learn from each other.”
Is Wake too big a school district?
Wake’s size — encompassing 857 square miles and 160,000 students — draws questions from families accustomed to smaller municipal school systems in other parts of the country.
The complaints often reach their zenith during weather events like snowstorms, when the entire district is closed because certain parts of the county are iced in or have lost power. Wake tries to avoid a repeat of what happened in January 2005, when more than 3,000 students were stranded at school overnight after Raleigh traffic was paralyzed by an afternoon ice storm.
Becky Lew-Hobbs acknowledges the benefits of the district’s size. It allowed her children to attend Wake’s magnet schools. But the chair of the Wake County chapter of Moms for Liberty says the district’s large size creates its own set of problems.
“From a geographical standpoint, yes, I would kind of like to see things broken up,” Lew-Hobbs said in an interview. “But I don’t know how to realistically handle that.”
Bill McNeal dealt with the snow issues when he was Wake County superintendent from 2000 to 2006. But he said dividing up Wake into smaller districts wouldn’t come close to replacing all the benefits and resources that come with being the state’s largest school district.
“When I look at the totality of the whole in having seen the growth academically that has taken place, and knowing how well our students have done coming from all of these municipalities, merger was absolutely a great idea,” McNeal said in an interview.
