Friday, December 7, 2007

Reassignment Countdown

Like many of you, I am anxiously awaiting the release of the reassignment plan. Unlike many of you, this is the first year that I've had to worry about it affecting my children directly. This is our first year at our base school, having been at a magnet the previous 4 years. So here I am with that same feeling of dread that so many of you across the county are feeling right now. Except now I have the added guilt of having taken my children out of their protected status and throwing them into this mess.


I've been thinking a lot lately about the desire for stability and what lengths parents will go to achieve it. Private schools, charter schools, homeschooling, and the magnet schools. A good friend of mine said something last year that really struck me. I asked if she had seen that some nodes near her had been reassigned to a year round school and her response was "Well, that's why we were smart enough to go to a magnet school".

I have two big problems with this statement. First, what about all the people who applied for magnet schools but were denied? We were LUCKY enough to get into the magnet system. What about people who would like to go to a magnet but can't make it work with their family's schedule? After school care is a different issue when you don't live or work anywhere near the school. A few magnet schools have regular 'neighborhood' buses, but most offer express buses or no bus at all and that makes it more difficult to arrange child care.

Second, my only reason for applying to a magnet school was because I wanted the special program (in my case, daily Spanish instruction) that only a magnet could provide. After hearing my friend's comment, I started to pay more attention to people when they talked about the magnet they were in and why they chose to attend a magnet. Many people attend a magnet mainly to escape reassignment or to escape their assigned base school for whatever reason. The special programs are secondary to them and that frustrates me.

I don't fault them for seeking a better situation for their children, but I am frustrated that at least some of them got chosen in the 'lottery' instead of somebody who really wanted the magnet programs. Programs that WCPSS is not willing to fund for everybody. If WCPSS is going to hold special academic programs hostage in the magnet schools then families who actually want those programs should be able to get them. Of course there is no answer to this because nobody is going to admit at application time that they are just there for the stability and not the program. But it still makes me angry that withholding academic programs is used as a weapon against families in Wake County.

Only 4.5 more hours until the assignment plan is released. Some of us will be cautiously relieved and some of us will be angry and frustrated. I know that whichever side I fall on I'll be hoping for the best for all of you. Good luck everybody.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Updated F&R Numbers

I've been MIA for a while and hopefully that will change starting with this post. Now that the F&R figures are out for the current year, I'm updating my list of schools that are over 50% F&R. The table below shows the schools currently over 50% along with their F&R% from last year. All schools are elementary unless there is an MS after the name.