Parents who oppose reassignment and socioeconomic busing in Wake County want to “roll back diversity,” said county commissioner Stan Norwalk at a recent public forum in downtown Raleigh.
“Rolling back diversity isn’t going to get you more schools, isn’t going to get you to year-round schools, isn’t going to get rid of reassignments,” said Norwalk, one of a dozen speakers who criticized efforts to reverse the school board’s strategy of busing children around the county based on income.
But others who spoke at the forum, held Thursday at Martin Street Baptist Church and sponsored by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens for African-American Children, said the current system is failing minority students.
“The bottom line for me is that the Wake County Public School System cannot show that the current busing-for-diversity policy is helping those who it’s supposed to be helping,” said Eric Blau, a Wake County parent.
“Everybody wants the best education for their kid, but putting them on a bus is not the same as educating them,” he said. “Every dollar that goes toward busing is a dollar that’s not going toward the classroom.”
The tense discussion underscored strife that has existed for years over the question of income-based busing. The school board approved a new batch of reassignments in early February that shuffles 24,654 students to different schools during the next three years. The policy has frustrated parents from across the political spectrum.
“When I moved here I was thrilled with the diversity policy, until I started really looking at what it was doing,” said Jennifer Mansfield, a self-described life-long Democrat and liberal, at the forum last week.
“Something that frustrates me when talking about the diversity policy is that if you’re like me, and you’re a critic of how it’s currently implemented, it becomes, ‘You want to segregate, you’re against diversity, you want to do it like Charlotte does it,’” she said. “It doesn’t have to be either or. We have to set some limits.”
George Green, a substitute math teacher in Wake County, took exception to parents who complained about reassignments between two affluent elementary schools in northwest Raleigh.
“If you support diversity, then you support the flexibility of the school board and its professional staff to put kids where they need to go to achieve it,” he said. “If you want to dig in, claim ownership at the elementary-school level, create an endowment for the school, make sure that the private dollars that support all of this extra-curricular activity are focused on your school, because your school is better and you take snobbish pride in that, then you’re part of the problem.”
Several elected officials spoke in favor of the socioeconomic busing plan, including N.C. Sen. Vernon Malone, D-Wake.
“Whether you like it or don’t like it, the issue is, I am thoroughly convinced, that when schools resemble the population of the state or an area, positives come about,” Malone said. “Why should we have a school system that’s one color when the shopping malls are not one color? People must learn to live internationally.”
But other parents said the issue wasn’t about race or diversity. “I think it’s unfortunate that this has become a conversation about desegregating the schools,” said Kathleen Brennan, a representative of the parent group Wake CARES, which sued the school district over its reassignment policy.
“In the last five years, over 39,000 children have been reassigned to different schools,” she said. “This places a huge burden on these children. We’ve lost focus on actually educating them.”
Legislative action
Prompted by angry parents, some Wake County legislators have taken steps to shake up the school board’s assignment policies.
Sen. Neal Hunt, R-Wake, introduced a bill Feb. 19 that requires school board members to assign students within a 1 1/2-mile radius of a public school to that school or else provide a voucher to attend a nonpublic school.
Another bill, introduced by Rep. Nelson Dollar, R-Wake, would shake up school board elections. Currently, Wake school board members run in nine separate districts. The legislation would make four board positions at-large seats and the rest district-based. It also would move the elections to even-numbered years in hopes of increasing voter turnout.
The Wake County Mayors Association considered drafting a resolution in support of at-large elections, but the association dropped it after the mayors couldn’t agree on all parts, according to the News & Observer of Raleigh.
David N. Bass is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.