The Blue Plan Debacle

Following is the letter I sent the Wake County School Board asking them to stop working on the blue plan and get more feedback from parents:

To the Members of the Wake County Board of Education:

On behalf of the parents and taxpayers of Wake County, I request that you immediately stop pursuing the “Choice-Based Plan” (formerly known as the Blue Plan) and begin looking for an alternative model that meets the true needs and desires of Wake Schools families. From the beginning, you’ve forced the public into a false choice between the "Blue Plan" and “Green Plan”, ignoring common sense approaches. Thursday night’s information session made it clear to me that this plan will not be ready for implementation in a few months as planned. After the never ending controversy and upheaval we experienced with previous assignment policy, it should be clear to you that any new assignment plan must have transparency to be successful. Under this controlled choice model, parents may not get their first, second or even third choice in this plan and they will never know why. We need an assignment plan that addresses the core principles that voters have asked for, including base assignments to schools which are reasonably close to home, magnet and calendar choice options for those that seek alternatives to their base school, diversion of transportation spending back into the classroom, and simplicity in how the plan is administered.

Consider the following:

• The public has insufficient information to evaluate these options. How many students live within 1.5 miles of each school? How many have each school as their closest school? Where are the maps illustrating these numbers?
  

• The Blue Plan is overly complex and is lacking in the transparency in assignment decisions that voters demanded in the 2009 elections.

• You asked parents if choice was important and they responded with a resounding ‘yes’, but you failed to ask the critical questions: Do parents really want to choose from 5 base schools? Or do they want a choice of calendar and magnet programs? You must answer these crucial questions before proceeding any further. Rather than asking parents what they want, it seems the question was designed to fit the plan that staff already had in mind.

• Feeder patterns are disruptive in many areas.

• The proposed assignment model may result in bus transportation to numerous non-magnet ‘base’ schools being provided to students living on the same street. We simply cannot afford to spend money on school buses instead of teachers in this challenging economic environment.

• The model’s use of “achievement schools” is perilously close to repeating the mistakes made by previous school boards: attempting to use an assignment plan to address an educational issue – something Wake County voters resoundingly rejected in 2009.

• In Cambridge, MA, which uses a similar controlled choice model, only 83% of families received their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice for the school year 2009-10. What factors contributed to this and could that be repeated here in Wake County?

• Transportation costs have still not been calculated for the plan and one Student Assignment Task Force member expressed concern that those costs will ‘blow up the plan’.

• Magnet programs and how they fit in the assignment model have not been adequately discussed and neither have our new ‘themed’ schools. We cannot develop a lasting student assignment plan without an objective review of those schools and their roles in the system.

Once again, the needs of parents and students have been forgotten, and your “Blue Plan” only takes us further from a path to a sensible assignment model. Please don’t waste any more time and resources toward developing this flawed model. The results of the Blue Plan "test drive" made it clear that the factors most valued by parents were proximity and calendar choice. We only have one chance to get this right. For the time being, let’s focus on fixing any onerous school assignments remaining from the previous assignment policy and let’s have a discussion about magnet programs and themed schools. Staff should be able to quickly develop a sensible assignment model which reflects the desires of Wake County parents and taxpayers in a transparent and user-friendly manner.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Mansfield
Wake County taxpayer, parent of 2 WCPSS students, and long time advocate for equity in Wake Schools

Blue Plan--What's Missing?

Before the BOE votes on which of the two plans to pursue, they really need to take some time to think about what information is missing from these plans. There are several pieces of information that I would like to see released and questions answered so we can better understand how the plan will affect each of us.

Proximity & Capacity

• How many students live within 1.5 miles of each school?
• Maps showing each school's 1.5 mile assignment area.
• How many students have each school as their 'closest' school?
• Maps showing each school's 'closest school' assignment area.
• How many seats are available in each school? How is that capacity determined? Will capacity be manipulated to ensure achievement balance?
• How many 'achievement choice' seats are being set aside in each school?
• Maps for each achievement school showing which low performing nodes have that school as an achievement option.
• Maps for each school showing which nodes have that school as one of their base options.
• Which schools have enough capacity (after the achievement seats are set aside) to accommodate all the children living within 1.5 miles? Which can accommodate all children who have each school as their closest? How many seats are left over at each school after accommodating all 'closest' and 'achievement' students?
  

Magnets

• What is the percentage of magnets seats set aside for magnet application students? Will it be the same percentage for each magnet school? If not, how will the percentage be determined for each magnet? Currently, magnets range from about 7% to 73% magnet application students.
  
• How will the magnets located in higher wealth areas be handled? We currently have several magnets that have their low income students bused in from outside the surrounding base nodes. Those are also the magnets that have experienced overcrowding and lowered the number of magnet acceptances to deal with that crowding.
• How will magnet seats be doled out? Will it be a true lottery? The green plan mentions using achievement as the criteria but there is no mention of any criteria at all in the blue plan. (Unless I am missing something--I looked and looked. If I'm wrong, somebody please point it out to me!)
  
• "In addition, a set percentage of non-magnet school seats will be reserved to accommodate calendar and achievement choices for students living in close proximity to magnet schools". What exactly does this mean? Are there seats set aside in each of the non-magnet choices on their list? What percentage?
• Is there enough room for all students who live near magnet schools to get a traditional calendar? Is there enough room in their proximate school options for all who want to stay close to home? Washington Terrace students (node 76), for example, are given the following elementary school choices (in proximity order): Hunter, Powell, Olds, Green, Dillard & Weatherstone. Hunter and Powell are both magnets with a limited amount of seats available to area students and Olds is one of our smallest elementary schools. How many students living in node 76 can be placed in those 3 schools? Green is Year Round, which has proven to be unpopular with lower income families. That leaves Dillard and Weatherstone as their remaining 2 traditional options; Dillard is about 6 miles away and Weatherstone is 16 miles away. I fear that low income children will still be bused far away for 'balance' whether they want to be or not.

Calendar

• What will be done to ensure calendar choice for people who only have one traditional or year round choice in their list of schools? If the only school with the calendar you desire is not your closest school, what are the chances you will get in?
• Will track continuity be guaranteed for elementary and middle school? The plan states ". . . track preferences will not be guaranteed other than the assurance that families with more than one student in a year-round school will be guaranteed track continuity within the family." Does that mean more than one student in a particular year round school or more than one student on the year round calendar? I would assume that it would be the latter but I have learned over the years that you can't assume anything.
  

Achievement

• Will we have access to achievement scores for all schools, with the data for each component of the calculation? Is it possible that an achievement school can be failing its low achieving students?
• Will feeder patterns be logical or will they be developed with achievement balance in mind? For instance, will a high performing, sought after elementary feed into a lower performing under enrolled middle school to increase achievement? Will a low performing elementary school feed into a high achieving middle school for balance?
• If parents do not participate in the choice process, where will they be sent? The plan states "Families who decline to make selections will be assigned to a school by the school system based on available seats consistent with the overall intentions of the plan". Will they be assigned to one of the base schools on their list or could they be placed anywhere the system wants to send them for achievement balance? If the latter is the case, then there isn't much incentive for WCPSS to promote parent participation.