One day after the Wake County Board of Education met to discuss a school reassignment proposal that would require more students to change schools for the 2008-2009 school year, the N.C. Court of Appeals heard arguments in a lawsuit that seeks to prevent the county from forcing families to convert to year-round schools.
The hour-long hearing on Jan. 9 hinged on the divisive question of whether parents or school board members should have the final say on year-round school reassignments.
Three appellate court judges, J. Douglas McCullough; Judge Martha A. Geer; and Judge Sanford L. Steelman, Jr., presided over the case. A ruling is expected within 90 days.
The hearing pitted lawyer Ann Majestic, who represented the school board, against the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Robert Hunter, who represented Wake CARES, a group of Wake residents opposed to mandatory conversion to year-round schools.
Majestic and Hunter agreed that N.C. law allows school boards to create year-round schools but the lawyers diverged on the question of whether school boards have the authority to involuntarily assign students to those schools.
“It’s the compulsion, the coercive nature of the school board’s reassignment, that is the issue here,” Hunter said. “The school board is taking what used to be predominantly volunteer year-round schools and coercing parents into them.”
Most of the discussion centered on interpretation of statutory law. Majestic argued that state law allows school boards to assign students to year-round public schools even without the permission of parents, while Hunter said the involuntary nature of the forced conversion to year-round schools violates the statutory requirement of “equal access to opportunities.”
“The opponents would have you believe this is simply a school assignment question, but our complaint frames it differently,” Hunter said. “This is a broader issue of whether people can attend [a traditional calendar school].”
Hunter argued that forced conversions affect the core of the family unit by adversely affecting the student, siblings, and parents. “If the family consents to [a year-round school], then the problem goes away,” he said. “It is only when you are compelled to go that we have a problem. We object to the coercive nature of it, where they had a voluntary program before, but now they are making it coercive.”
Majestic countered by claiming no right exists for parental review. “There is no evidence in the statutes of a requirement of informed parental consent,” she said. “It reminds me of modern dance — creative, but contortive. That’s good in art, but it’s not good in statutory construction.”
Majestic also questioned whether the plaintiffs, a group of parents who claimed harm from having to convert to a year-round schedule, have appropriate standing to bring the lawsuit. “There has got to be some injury here,” she said.
Wake CARES filed the complaint in March. In May, Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning, Jr., ruled that the county lacked the authority to convert traditional calendar schools to mandatory year-round calendars. Manning also found that the school board could not compel students to attend such schools without informed parental consent.
In June, the Court of Appeals denied a request by the school board to stay Manning’s decision, which would have allowed the board to continue converting some students to year-round schedules with the case pending before the appellate court.
The appeals court hearing followed a Wake County school board meeting in which the board considered a “growth management proposal” for the 2008-09 school year. The plan, which could affect more than 6,800 students, would transfer about 3,200 students to schools farther from their homes and 3,600 students closer to their homes. The proposal would affect only elementary schools.
Hundreds of parents and students from Davis Drive Elementary in Cary attended the meeting Tuesday to protest the proposal, according to the News & Observer of Raleigh. The proposal would transfer some Davis Drive students to Laurel Park Elementary.
The school board has held two public hearings on the reassignment plan — Jan. 15 at Sanderson High School in Raleigh, and Jan. 17 at Green Hope High School in Cary. A final one will be held Thursday, Jan. 24, at Middle Creek High School in Apex. The board will vote on the proposal Feb. 5.
The issue of school assignment is pressing in Wake County since the county’s public school system is one of the fastest growing in the nation. Total enrollment in Wake County schools for the 2006-07 school year was more than 128,000 students, and the county projected an annual 8,000-student enrollment increase over the next four years.
The school board has pushed year-round schools as a way to deal with crowding. Traditional calendar schools operate for 180 days and run from late August through early June. The multitrack year-round calendar, also 180 days, splits the school year into four nine-week quarters with three-week breaks between. School systems operating on a multitrack system use buildings 12 months each year, while school systems using a traditional calendar option use buildings nine months each year.
David Bass is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.