Eric Blau will be stepping down from the Wake County school board's student assignment committee.

Blau said he's resigning because he's going to grad school in August and his wife will give birth in September. School board member Deborah Prickett said she nominated Blau to represent District 7 on the committee knowing he'd only be able to stay on for a short period.

Prickett has nominated Tracey Noble to replace Blau. Noble is a Brier Creek area parent who was actively involved in last winter's community engagement meetings that helped lead to the reassignment changes that impacted that part of northwest Raleigh.

The Wake County school board's superintendent search committee has backed hiring Chicago-based Heidrick & Struggles to help conduct the search for a new search.

Heidrick & Struggles was backed Monday night over three cheaper firms. Heidrick is offering to do the search for $82,500 plus expenses while the N.C. School Boards Association was the cheapest at $15,000 plus expenses.

Debra Goldman, chairwoman of the board's superintendent search committee, said they were impressed by Heidrick & Struggles' expertise. Heidrick has been involved in superintendent searches such as Houston and Philadelphia.

There could be a recommendation tonight on which headhunter to hire to help the Wake County school board find a new superintendent to replace Del Burns.

The school board's superintendent search committee will interview tonight the last of the four firms who've submitted proposals. The other three firms were interviewed last week.

Debra Goldman, chairwoman of the search committee, said they may be in a position tonight to make a recommendation, which would still need to be approved by the full board. The committee could recommend one of the four firms or say they don't like any of them and ask for a new round of offers.

By popular request, here's a post on the questionnaires that three of the four new Wake County school board members had filled out last spring when they asked for the endorsement of the Wake County Republican Party.

I've got the questionnaires for Debra Goldman, Chris Malone and John Tedesco. I don't have Deborah Prickett's questionnaire but she was also endorsed by the Wake GOP.

Critics of the board majority have used the questionnaires to argue that the new members have politicized the board. You guys can read and decide.

Taxpayers won't be footing the bill for four Wake County school board members to attend this week's Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce trip to the Greater D.C. area.

Chamber VP Drew Moretz said that the group wanted school board members to attend the trip so much that they're picking up all the costs. School board members Debra Goldman, Anne McLaurin, Deborah Prickett and John Tedesco are attending.

But taxpayers may foot the nearly $2,000 cost to send four county commissioners on the trip.

CORRECTION/UPDATE

The chamber says that McLaurin paid for the trip herself.

Parrish said Gurley has reimbursed the county for his share of the trip.

Wake County school board chairman Ron Margiotta has named the members of the superintendent search committee but Keith Sutton is not one of them.

Board vice chairwoman Debra Goldman will chair the committee. She had previously been charged with looking at various firms that might be hired to help conduct the search.

Goldman will be joined on the committee by Chris Malone, Carolyn Morrison and Deborah Prickett.

UPDATE

Click here to view the school district's press release on the committee appointments. 

Schools will be in the spotlight in a pair of inter-city trips over the next two weeks.

This week, the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Chamber will host visitors from the Richmond area in Virginia. Next week, four Wake County school board members are part of a chamber-sponsored trip to the Greater D.C. area.

During next week's trip, the Raleigh group will visit Fairfax County Public Schools in northern Virginia, whose assignment system had been cited as a model that Wake can use for its community-based schools.

Would you be wiling to send Wake County elementary students to the bus stop before 7 a.m. in order to flip schedules around to start high schools later in the day?

School transportation officials presented a model last week of what things could look like if high schools were to start after 9 a.m. But the model would involve flipping around the three-tier bus system so that some elementary schools start at 7:25 a.m.

It's not an option that most school board members are considering, at least for this fall. Whether there's interest down the road remains to be seen.

Some questions were raised at Tuesday's Wake County school board meeting when board members Debra Goldman and Deborah Prickett weren't present for the start of public comment.

Both board members missed the first 11 of the 20 speakers. Their absence was noticed by Christine Kushner, a critic of the new board majority and member of the Great Schools in Wake Coalition, who asked if she would wait for them to return before she spoke.

School board chairman Ron Margiotta's answer that Goldman and Prickett were in a meeting was met with audible skepticism by the crowd.

The Lacy-Stough and Garner-Southeast Raleigh moves were approved Tuesday, but not without some melodrama.

As noted in today's article, the board majority voted 5-4 to reverse the 2009 reassignment of three nodes from Lacy Elementary School to Stough Elementary. But the vote came after Deborah Prickett objected to media coverage about how the Lacy families had given political donations to help the new board majority last fall.

Prickett called it "political" that the N&O had run a story that mentioned the contributions on the day of the board vote. She said the article gave the impression that "affluent parents aren’t supposed to have a choice."