The Wake County school board appointed a new principal tonight to lead Carpenter Elementary School in Cary.

April Hill, an assistant principal at Durant Road Elementary School, will be paid $80,857 a year to lead Carpenter. She's been at Durant Road since 2010 and before that spent five years as an assistant principal at Green Hope Elementary.

Hill won't start at Carpenter until Dec. 3 so Freda Cole will serve as interim principal. Cole was principal at Forest Pines Elementary until she retired earlier this year.

UPDATE

Click here to view the bio sheets.

New data shows that Wake County's year-round schools have imbalanced tracks in terms of enrollment, but school administrators say they're working to ease the problem over time.

Handouts from today's Wake County school board facilities committee meeting show that track four is above capacity while tracks two and three are way below their capacity. For instance, track two is operating at 68 percent of capacity districtwide in elementary schools and 44.5 percent in the middle schools.

The capacity figures are based on ideal long-range capacity, which is designed to reduce the number of modulars and mobiles on each campus. The capacity percentages would likely be lower if you base it off annual campus capacity, which takes into account all the temporary classrooms in use.

UPDATE

Click here to view Wake's plan for balancing the tracks and the 2012-13 year-round school utlilization by track.

Updated to make it clearer that decisions about collapsing tracks are no longer solely the call of the principal. It's now supposed to be done in coordination with the new plan to balance out tracks over time.

Conflicting views on the feeder patterns could determine just how stable they'll be for families moving forward in Wake County's new student assignment plan.

During Tuesday's school board meeting, Democratic board members were skeptical about being able to guarantee that families could have a feeder pattern locked in for 13 years. Board members said it's more realistic to talk about guaranteeing stability for students once they're in a school,

But Republican board members and staff said that 13 years of feeder stability is possible.

Is it a higher value for Wake County students to attend their neighborhood school or for students from low-performing nodes to be able to get into a high-performing school?

That issue is at the heart of changes being proposed to bump up the importance of student achievement in the selection process for the new student assignment plan. If implemented, the changes could result in students from low-performing nodes taking away openings at the high-performing schools from the families who live near them.

“We want to make sure that low-performing students and minority students get a good shot at some of these schools,” Democratic board vice chairman Keith Sutton said last week. “We want to make sure the plan is successful. We don’t want to create more high-poverty schools.”

Did the Wake County school board make a mistake in 2010 by voting to open Mills Park Middle on a traditional calendar instead of as planned on the year-round calendar?

As noted in today's article, the answer was yes Tuesday from several Carpenter Elementary parents who blamed the decision to open Mills Park on a traditional calendar as a big reason why they're feeding into East Cary Middle in the new student assignment plan.

Without Middle Park as a year-round school, the plan gives the Carpenter families calendar continuity by sending them to East Cary. But parents said it's their seventh closest middle school located on the other side of Cary.

Look for a protest outside outside today's Wake County school board meeting over the new student assignment plan.

Parents from Carpenter Elementary have secured a permit from Cary Police to picket on the sidewalk in front of the Central Services Building. They're coming with signs and bullhorns for the demonstration.

Several parents will also speak during public comment at the board meeting. They're objecting how the new plan has Carpenter feeding into East Cary Middle.

The feeder is supposed to provide calendar continuity for the year-round students. But the Carpenter parents say they want to go to a closer middle school. A number of families now go to Davis Drive Middle.