Pat Dollard

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WRAL:

Raleigh, N.C. — The Wake County Board of Education voted Tuesday to end the school system’s long-standing student assignment policy.

About 80 people spoke at a heated public hearing before the board voted 5-to-4 in favor of a assignment model in which students go to schools within a certain community zone. The decade-old assignment method buses students across the district to help achieve socio-economic diversity, allowing no school more than 40 percent of students receiving free- or reduced-price lunches.

Newly elected board member John Tedesco said the majority’s vision for a new model of neighborhood schools is to give parents choices. He said busing students to achieve diversity wasn’t been working.

“That has only ended up promoting low expectations, and that model of education has not served us very well,” Tedesco said Tuesday.

The community-based assignment plan was a key point in last year’s election, in which voters elected Tedesco, and three other candidates who said they supported moving away from the diversity policy.

Despite tensions over the plan that have lingered for weeks, Tedesco joined board Chairman Ron Margiotta and members Deborah Prickett, Chris Malone and Debra Goldman in voting in favor of the neighborhood-schools resolution, while board members Keith Sutton, Kevin Hill, Anne McLaurin and Carolyn Morrison voted against it.

Opponents of resolution fear it will lead to re-segregation.

“It certainly appears we have moved in that direction,” McLaurin said.

“I am very disappointed,” Sutton said following the vote.

The newly elected board members have insisted that they have no plans to segregate students.

“Everybody believes in diversity,” Malone said. “We are a very integrated community, and we are going to continue being so.”

Rev. William Barber, chairman of the state NAACP, said his group plans a “mass forum” to discuss the assignment change and that he will be scrutinizing every move of the board as they work on the community-schools model.

“Let it be known, your press to go backward will only serve to intensify our moral and political and legal fight to go forward. We will never go back,” Barber told the board Tuesday.