Parents angry over on-going school reassignment used a recent public hearing to give the Wake County School Board a tongue-lashing for offering a new proposal that would continue shuffling students across the county to meet socio-economic diversity goals.
“What we ask, and what we continue to ask, is whether this is working,” Kathleen Brennan, a representative of the parent-group Wake CARES, told school board members at the Jan. 15 hearing. “Most people would agree that having students reassigned repeatedly, having students go 15 miles from their homes, having students on buses two hours a day, having at-risk students get on a bus at six in the morning, is probably not a good idea.”
Delana Anderson, who has a kindergartener at Oak Grove Elementary in Raleigh, asked whether children are better served spending two hours a day on a bus or participating in after-school programs that would improve their future.
“Who does this benefit?” Anderson said. “Certainly not the children, who will be spending more time traveling to school; certainly not parents, who will find it more difficult to participate in their child’s education; and certainly not schools that are losing community support. Do what’s best for the children you represent.”
Most parents attending the two-hour hearing at Sanderson High School criticized the growth-management proposal presented to the school board Jan. 8. That proposal could transfer about 3,200 students to schools farther from their homes.
The board has scheduled three public hearings leading up to a final vote on the reassignment proposal Feb. 5. So many parents wanted to speak at the second of the three meetings, conducted Jan. 17 at Green Hope High School in Cary, that school board members had to divide the group between two separate rooms, according to the The News & Observer of Raleigh.
Several of the two-dozen parents who signed up to address school board members at Sanderson High School asked the board to approve a more family-friendly schedule. Kay Taylor, a mother with children in elementary, middle, and high school, was one of those.
“A policy for healthy families would have children in the same family on the same school calendar, attending the same schools located in their community,” Taylor said. “No family should be forced into different calendars for children in the same family, or bused more than thirty minutes one way. Every child needs stability to be successful in school.”
One woman said her son was moved to Hunter Elementary in Raleigh for the 2006-2007 school year, but the new proposal would shift him to another school. “My son is one of many students who will be forced to attend three schools in four years,” she said. “It’s too much to ask for these families to change schools once again.”
“Learning is best achieved when the child feels comfortable and safe in their environment,” she said. “Every time they are forced to move to a new school, that’s a new environment, a new set of teachers, and new children that they must adjust to and feel comfortable with.”
Other participants took a different view of year-round assignments. Bill Mitchell, the father of a fifth-grader, said looking at year-round schools is “probably not a bad idea.”
“Eventually, it looks like all of the schools are going to be year-round, and it might be time to consider that for the future sooner rather than later, because obviously with this sort of growth, that’s the only way you’re going to be able to put all the kids through school,” Mitchell said.
Other parents discussed busing and diversity. Cary resident Mark Lawson, whose children attend Davis Drive Elementary, called the way school board members were breaking things up “appalling.”
“I’m totally miffed that we’re going to be busing people in the early morning and getting them back late to make a percentage look good on a sheet of paper,” Lawson said. “Children are not about a sheet of paper — they’re about learning and growing and a sense of community.”
Another mother with two children at Leesville Road Elementary drew applause from the audience when she asked the school board to survey parents on whether they want a traditional or year-round calendar, and then abide by the result.
“There is no safe place to go in Wake County where you can say, ‘This is my school, this is where I want to go,’ because you have a constant threat of reassignment,” she said. “And I echo the parents who spoke about their children — these are the crucial years for development. Why uproot them?”
David N. Bass is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.