The strategic plan, improving board communications and honoring students and employees will be on today's Wake County school board agenda.

The board will open today's retreat by spending two hours discussing the strategic plan that AdvancED wants the district to complete. The board had a lengthy discussion on it at the December retreat.

The next two hours of the retreat will be spent on board communications and protocol, detailing what should happen between board members and board members and staff. The tense exchanges in recent months are what prompted school board chairman Kevin Hill to make his call for proper decorum last week.

Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata and three school board members are heading to Pittsburgh this weekend to see what education lessons they can learn from the Steel City.

The Wake school contingent is among a group of local elected officials, government officials, business people and community leaders who are participating in this year's Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce Inter-City Visit and Leadership Conference. The group will meet with different Pittsburgh leaders to see how the city has transformed itself.

On the education side, the part of the trip that will most likely be relevant is a discussion about The Pittsburgh Promise Program. Students who graduate from Pittsburgh Public Schools or local charter high schools with at least a 2.5 GPA and 90 percent attendance record receive up to $40,000 in college scholarships for in-state schools.

SEE UPDATE/CORRECTION ON HOW COSTS OF TRIP ARE BEING COVERED

Is the Wake County school system undergoing "militarization" under the tenure of Superintendent Tony Tata?

That's a charge leveled in this Dec. 16 article by Jason Langberg and Lewis Pitts from the liberal Advocates for Children's Services. The article points to Tata's military career, the requirement of Junior ROTC for the new single-sex leadership academies and Wake's recent involvement in cybersecurity competitions.

The authors start by calling the Occupy Wall Street movement an "education justice movement." The piece charges that public education has "undergone a corporate coup" with the "mega-buck mafia’s buyout of public education."

The Wake County school board will dive into the details of Superintendent Tony Tata's draft strategic plan during today's all-day retreat.

AdvancED required Wake to develop a strategic plan as one of its seven action steps when it put Wake's high schools on accreditation warned status in March. The old board started the process when it adopted the mission, vision and core beliefs for the district.

Now it's up to the new board to finish the process.

"The Ron Margiotta Record" is the focus of this recent campaign mailer sent by the incumbent Wake County school board chairman.

Margiotta says in the mailer that during his two terms on the board "student achievement has steadily improved" and "today Wake County Public Schools ranks as one of the top districts in the Nation." He cites things such as the first gain in graduation rates in seven years, 95 percent of schools meeting or exceeding state ABC growth goals and the increase in placement among qualified middle school students in advanced math classes.

Margiotta also touts things such as no teacher layoffs in the face of $100 million in budget cuts, how he "protected all magnet programs across the county after federal support dollars ended" and the Broad Superintendents Academy audit showing the leanness of the district's operations.

School funding and the role of magnet schools are just some of the issues dividing Wake County school board candidates Jim Martin and Cynthia Matson in the District 5 race.

As noted in today's article by Thomas Goldsmith, Matson is talking at looking for areas to cut out the budget as opposed to asking for funding increases that could raise taxes.

“I’d like to see us make better use of the resources we do have,” Matson said. “There are a lot of ways to manage the budget in a more fiscally responsible way.”

The Wake County school board filled two of the district's top administrative positions tonight and appointed a new principal for Wake Forest-Rolesville High School.

Cathy Moore was named to the new position of deputy superintendent for school performance, where she will be in charge of academics. Moore, whose salary was not immediately known, has been the area superintendent for Central Wake since 2008 and before then was principal of Sanderson High School.

Judith Peppler was hired for the new position of chief transformation officer, where her duties will include overseeing student assignment, long-range planning and professional development.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST ON PEPPLER, FOR THE BIO SHEETS, FOR THEIR SALARY INFO AND LINK TO WCPSS PRESS RELEASE ON THE HIRES

The Wake County Republican Party is praising the GOP majority on the school board, railing against school administration costs and downplaying the significance of per-student spending.

In last week's issue of the Elephant Express, Wake GOP Chairwoman Susan Bryant told her fellow Republicans they "can be proud of your hard work to elect a Republican majority to the Wake County School Board."
 
"The change you made in the board composition has made possible budget cuts in almost all areas without the sacrifice of a single teacher," Bryant writes. "Who would have thought so much waste could exist under the eyes of the previous Democrat-controlled board?"

Here's the quick summary of the new academic audit done of Wake County schools.

Wake still outperforms the state on state exams but the gap is narrowing with the rest of North Carolina growing at a faster rate. Wake’s low-income students aren’t growing as fact academically as their more affluent peers and higher poverty schools are on average not showing as much growth as more affluent schools.

A finding that drew discussion was the one in which, in general, schools with high percentages of free and reduced lunch students have lower rates of growth in reading and math exams than schools with low percentage of free and reduced lunch students.

Here's an abbreviate recap of the discussion at today's Wake County school board retreat.

At Superintendent Tony Tata's request, the board agreed to set target performance goals for individual subgroups as opposed to a specific systemwide goal. Tata will consult with staff and come back with a draft of the specific numbers for the targets. (It's a variation on the goals set by the prior boards.)

This came amid a discussion in which Tata said a new audit will show Wake isn't closing the achievement gap.

UPDATE

When Tata reports back on the subgroup goals, he'll also indicate what impact they'd have if reached on systemwide performance. He said they'll discuss then whether to set a districtwide performance goal as well.

Click here to view the handout from the meeting.