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Nor is it as complicated as the old Board made it. Hopefully there is a happy medium in which it's possible to achieve greater stability for families (less frequent re-assignments), some level of economic diversity, and greater emphasis for nearby schools.
Really? You realize the Wake School system has 134,000 students, and adds roughly 5000 students a year?
For perspective, the entire Chapel Hill school system serves roughly 11,000 students with 10 elementary, 4 middle and 3 high schools. Wake effectively adds a Chapel Hill school district every two years.
Dealing with this amount of growth, while dealing with a county board that allocates insufficient funds for building and running new schools to accomodate that growth, and trying to avoid creating the poor school death spirals that exist in so many southern metropolitan cities, is by its very nature complicated. The old board came up with a functional system. A functional system with warts, but a functional system nonetheless.
The new idealogues in charge are great at complaining, but I've yet to see any outline of a functional system. Repeating neighborhood schools three times while clicking your heels together does not address the three major challenges outlined above...it doesn't even address one of them. Indeed, their first action was to cancel the construction of a high school which could cost the system millions of dollars. If trends hold, Wake will add 20,000 students in the next 4 years of the new school board members terms. I'm pretty skeptical that they comprehend the potential consequences of their ideological biases.
Really? You realize the Wake School system has 134,000 students, and adds roughly 5000 students a year?
For perspective, the entire Chapel Hill school system serves roughly 11,000 students with 10 elementary, 4 middle and 3 high schools. Wake effectively adds a Chapel Hill school district every two years.
I realize there are complexities involved - but how complex one makes it depends on the values one strives to pursue, and how one balances competing values against one another. Both the old and new boards can be accused of pursuing extremes at the expense of the middle.
I lived in Wake County for 8 years. During just a few years of that time, we suffered through 3 reassignments; assignment to a school 12 miles away when the closest one was 3/4 mile from our house; a lack of any bus transportation for half a year, and being relegated to the ESL bus (and a very long route) for the balance of it; and assignment of a 5:45 a.m. middle school bus stop time for another year. I dealt with the old Board. I met with our Board representative in her office. I appealed school assignments twice (to no avail). I know how maddeningly frustrating it was to me to have a Board that seemed to turn a deaf ear to parents over and over.
I don't mean to re-hash these issues, but I think it's arrogant to suggest that the old Board got everything right while the new Board is getting everything wrong.
Last edited by CHTransplant; 02-23-2010 at 10:26 AM..
But I don't think the majority of voters had any idea who was funding the campaigns and who on a national level was supporting and pay attention to the last school board election in Wake County. The MAJORITY of voters just look at how something will affect them and their families and rarely take the time (understandably because of time constraints) to really see who and what is behind the person at the microphone.
I think that's a fair point, as TurborgP pointed out above, politics may have created some strange bedfellows here.
Chuck was carrying out Board Policy 6200, as directed by the board. It is not his agenda, it was the agenda of the old board. He made recommendations to the board on how to carry out Policy 6200. The board was free to say yes or no to those recommendations.
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I partially agree with you. Previous boards have never given Chuck any priorities for the 6 'factors' of Policy 6200. They left it up to him to make the 'value judgements' and rarely questioned him. Leaving it up to GM to decide is a bad idea no matter who is in charge. There has to be some accountability. Board members would sometimes question him on some assignments, but they usually just took his explanation and didn't question it.
However, Chuck most definitely had an agenda. He got to prioritize things the way he wanted to and diversity trumped everything else in many of the decisions.
Honestly aside from the superintendent issue...how on earth can they make such sweeping changes in time to keep their backers happy? Are they still saying it will be 2010-11 when they implement?
The only thing they've said will be implemented next year is not denying somebody YR because of SES. Otherwise, they've said that the changes cannot take place until 2011-12 because its just too complicated. They know that they cannot come up with a plan in that short of a time period.
I realize there are complexities involved - but how complex one makes it depends on the values one strives to pursue, and how one balances competing values against one another. Both the old and new boards can be accused of pursuing extremes at the expense of the middle.
I lived in Wake County for 8 years. During just a few years of that time, we suffered through 3 reassignments; assignment to a school 12 miles away when the closest one was 3/4 mile from our house; a lack of any bus transportation for half a year, and being relegated to the ESL bus (and a very long route) for the balance of it; and assignment of a 5:45 a.m. middle school bus stop time for another year. I dealt with the old Board. I met with our Board representative in her office. I appealed school assignments twice (to no avail). I know how maddeningly frustrating it was to me to have a Board that seemed to turn a deaf ear to parents over and over.
I don't mean to re-hash these issues, but I think it's arrogant to suggest that the old Board got everything right while the new Board is getting everything wrong.
I think that would qualify as what I described as a "wart", as opposed to saying the old board got everything right.
You chose to move to a county that was adding 5000 kids a year to it's school district, and presumably you moved to a part of the said county that was growing quickly. What you experienced was clearly inconvenient for you. What works for the district as a whole is not always going to be what works best for an individual student or family. But, while not "best", that doesn't mean what was offered to you wasn't "good".
Nor is it as complicated as the old Board made it. Hopefully there is a happy medium in which it's possible to achieve greater stability for families (less frequent re-assignments), some level of economic diversity, and greater emphasis for nearby schools.
YES!! I agree with this completely. Frankly, if Burns and previous BOEs had been willing to compromise on some of these things we wouldn't be where we are today. Busing kids 18 miles one way just for diversity? Ridiculous, yet previous attempts to get WCPSS to listen fell on deaf ears.
THis is so oversimplified it is funny. If someone builds a new 200 house subdivision in a empty field in that circle, then that school is over crowded, while the school in a more established "circle" will become less and less crowded as their kids head off to college. So either you have overcrowded and undercrowded schools as the norm using such "circles" or you redraw the circles EVERY YEAR...not sure the "don't move my kids around so much" people will like that...oh, wait, they are the ones pushing this "draw circle" ideas.
It is not as simple as the new Board members like to think it is.
They key here is that this scenario has NOT been proposed by the new board. This was something suggested by somebody here, correct? And then you extrapolated it out to show a flaw in that suggestion. The problem is that everybody wants to assume that they know what this all means when in reality the board is still working on it. THey have said that they will not make any assignment changes until at least the 2011-12 school year.
I understand that you may disagree with their new plan when it comes out, but please at least respond to facts rather than suppositions and worst case scenarios.
You chose to move to a county that was adding 5000 kids a year to it's school district, and presumably you moved to a part of the said county that was growing quickly.
Actually I moved into an established neighborhood in an area that was built out. We were a "node assignment" pulled out from the balance of our neighborhood and sent to distant schools for purposes of economic diversity. In total, 3 kids were shipped off, while everyone else in the neighborhood went to the nearby school.
Quote:
Originally Posted by toot68
What you experienced was clearly inconvenient for you. What works for the district as a whole is not always going to be what works best for an individual student or family. But, while not "best", that doesn't mean what was offered to you wasn't "good".
You're right toot - it was my individual situation. And other families had theirs. And that's what lead some people to believe that change was needed in WCPSS. Please note, though, that saying change was needed is not the same thing as saying I support everything the new Board is trying to do.
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