Is it case closed for any further need to review the school resource officer  program in Wake County's schools?

As noted in Saturday's article, Superintendent Tony Tata is giving at least partial credit for this year's drop in school crime on the presence of the SROs. Combined with the response from the survey of middle school and high school principals and assistant principals, Tata doesn't feel there's a need to make major changes.

"We’ve got a lot of things we can work on here in Wake County and I think that school resource officers is an area where we can work on the margin but I think these statistics show its effectiveness and I think the response from the principals and assistant principals show its effectiveness," Tata said at Friday's news conference.

An overhaul of Wake County student discipline policies that largely eliminates zero-tolerance punishments could be adopted as soon as this week.

As noted in today's article, the Wake school board will vote Tuesday on a series of changes to the discipline policy with the biggest change being how suspensions would now be issued. School leaders expect the changes will reduce how often and how long students are suspended from school.

The changes appear to enjoy broad board support. Even critics of Wake's current discipline policies acknowledge it's a major change.

Supporters of the old Wake County diversity policy are making no bones about the fact that they're going after the school system at Friday's Stand Against Racism event at noon in Moore Square in downtown Raleigh.

Before last year's event, sponsors from the YWCA of the Greater Triangle event downplayed ahead of time that they'd be discussing the Wake school system. But it turned into a heated attack of the school board majority.

This time, organizers say they're targeting "systemic racism embedded in policies of the Wake County Public School System," namely the student suspension and discipline polices. It's one of the arguments that was used in the NAACP complaint of Wake that's being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

UPDATE

After having sent out another release this morning promoting the event, organizers just sent out a message this afternoon saying it's been postponed until August.

The most anticipated discussion topic at last week's Wake County school board economically disadvantaged student performance task force meeting was the Fund 6 balances for individual schools.

Each school maintains a Fund 6 account for the revenues they generate. The amounts vary widely among the schools and are used to pay for a variety of things.

Questions about Enloe High School having the most Fund 6 revenue this past fiscal year of any school in the district at $649,325.95 took up a good chunk of the discussion. Click here for the handouts.

Critics of the Wake County school system's student suspension policies are poised to get a win today.

School administrators will ask the school board today to change the definition of a long-term suspension to mean anything longer than 10 days to the rest of the school year. Currently, a long-term suspension means you're out for the rest of the school year with no exceptions.

Principals would have discretion, except where state law has a mandatory penalty, to determine whether to allow the student back before the end of the school year. Wake issues more than 1,000 long-term suspensions each school year.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST

The Great Schools in Wake Coalition will be holding back-to-school forums "to give parents the critical information they need to advocate for their students in the coming school year."

In a press release Tuesday, GSIW said the first forum will be held Aug. 16 at 7 p.m. at the YWCA of the Greater Triangle, 554 East Hargett Street, Raleigh. The focus of that forum will be student assignment, educational rights and legal rights.

At a time when school diversity seems to be dividing the community and Wake County school board, it looks like reducing student suspensions is one thing that people can agree upon.

As noted in today's article, the school board's economically disadvantaged student performance task force was receptive to most of the recommendations on Thursday for reducing the number and length of suspensions. Things such as reducing the length of long-term suspensions and finding more alternatives to suspensions got a favorable response.

“I think as a community we need to find the ties that bind us instead of those that separate us,” said school board member John Tedesco, chairman of the ED task force. “This is one of the ties that binds us.”

UPDATE

See end of post for links to Langberg's presentation and his report. Changed the link for the PDF for the presentation to reflect what was shown to the task force.

It looks like new and old Wake County school board members have found common ground when it comes to calling for a review of the district's zero tolerance discipline policies.

As noted in today's article, Keith Sutton and John Tedesco are among the board members who think that zero tolerance is resulting in too many suspensions and keeping too many students out of school. They're calling for a review that school board chairman Ron Margiotta agrees is needed.

"We have a very strong majority that wants to review the old policies for changes, including those on discipline," Margiotta said.