The magnet school program will be a major discussion topic during today's Wake County school board meeting.

During the work session, staff will recommend which schools to include in the new federal magnet grant application. This means staff will identify today which schools are recommended for new magnet programs and which existing magnets will see major revisions to their themes.

Whether staff also recommends today which schools to demagnetize remains to be seen.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST

What's the proper balance between having Wake County school board meetings run efficiently and allowing individual members to get their concerns aired in public?

The school board's policy committee is forwarding along proposed changes to how meetings are run, including how information items can be requested and the minimum notice for bringing information to board members.

But school board member Debra Goldman is concerned that the changes could make it harder for board members to get information items added. She's also concerned that the changes in policy also don't provide a way for minority members to get action items added.

Future plans for a ninth-grade center to control overcrowding at Panther Creek High School are back on hold again.

The Wake County school board voted last week to direct staff not to spend any additional money on design work to place modular units for Panther Creek's ninth-grade center on the M-16 campus. The vote was made possible because of the absence of two Democratic board members, giving Republicans a temporary majority.

Whether the Democratic majority will let that stand at next week's meeting remains to be seen. At least some GOP board members want to return to the original plan of leasing an office building on Pleasant Grove Church Road in Morrisvillle.

Bob Luebke says the Wake County school board's passage of the student assignment directive "is not encouraging for conservatives," "disappointing" and "the same old school assignment plan in different packaging."

In this online article Thursday for the conservative Civitas Institute, Luebke writes "don't believe him" when school board chairman Kevin Hill says they're not going back to the old assignment plan. He points to how Hill talks about "healthy schools" and "diversity."

"While most candidates played nice during last fall’s election, it was really only a matter of time before the masks came off and the major philosophical differences between the two camps were exposed," Luebke writes.

Wake County school board chairman Kevin Hill is pointing to the need to change the student assignment plan for diversity reasons and downplaying concerns the recent vote will negatively impact a looming school bond issue.

In this interview last Tuesday on the Bill LuMaye Show on WPTF, Hill said the reason for passing the student assignment directive was the data they had been receiving over the last month about school demographic trends from the new choice plan. Hill said they were concerned that they could add 10 new high-needs schools with high levels of poverty.

"I've heard the superintendent on record all spring basically say there's going to need to be some changes, there's going to be some tweaks," Hill said. "As a board we've been supportive of the choice plan through the spring, but I think this data was kind of alarming in terms of where enrollment was going at several schools. The superintendent again is on record as saying it's cheaper to keep a school from becoming high risk than to deal with a school once it is high risk."

The concept of healthy schools and the significance of the student assignment directive, along with how it was passed by the Wake County school board, were among the topics on WRAL's "On The Record" show on Saturday.

David Crabtree, the host of the show, asked whether the passage of the directive meant the Wake County school system was headed back to where it was before the 2009 school board elections. School board chairman Kevin Hill said the directive calls for staff to “look at the best pieces of the past several assignment processes we’ve had and move forward.”

But school board member Deborah Prickett answered that “this plan is looking to me that it is slipping backwards." She said the directive “is a fundamental change" to the choice plan and "is actually going after the structure of the plan.”

Wake County's new choice-based student assignment plan is producing some unusual oddities for the 2012-13 school year that opens today with the return of year-round students.

As noted in today's article, Wake has 151,487 students registered for the new school year, 1,000 more than expected. But staff isn't certain how much of that growth is attributable to phantom students who were gaming the choice plan.

Another quirk of the choice plan is that Richland Creek Elementary School only has 34 students registered so far for its Aug. 27 opening. That's far fewer students than it would have opened with under the old base-school assignment plan.

Supporters of restoring diversity to Wake County's student assignment plan have been talking about a recent article on resegregation and school choice in the Winston-Salem Forsyth County schools.

This Sunday article in the Winston-Salem Journal notes how the school district phased out busing for diversity starting in 1995 in favor of "choice zones," which allow parents to choose from among multiple schools. The article says that racial resegregation quickly accelerated in the schools and led to concentrated poverty in certain schools.

"Despite zoned assignment plans offering parents diverse school choices, local schools tend to reflect their neighborhoods," according to the article. "And those neighborhoods, while changing, still reflect the legacy of zoning laws that laid out where black people were allowed to live for much of the 20th century."

The days of the Wake County school board holding an annual meeting in June to elect a chair and vice chair will soon be over.

Last week, the General Assembly passed a bill that eliminates wording saying the Wake school board must hold its annual meeting to elect board officers in June or July. This will allow the school board to hold the annual meeting whenever it wants, likely in December after the fall board elections.

The change came about because in 2009 the new Republican majority kicked Kevin Hill out of his term early to make Ron Margiotta the board chair. The new Democratic majority reciprocated last year by kicking John Tedesco out early as vice chair in favor of Keith Sutton.

Rather than go through the process of picking new officers in December and then holding another vote in June, the board unanimously agreed to ask the legislature to change the local law. This now means that the terms of board chairman Kevin Hill and vice chairman Keith Sutton will likely end in December instead of June.

Despite some speculation otherwise, it looks like the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce will be helping promote passage of a Wake County school construction bond measure that's expected to be on the ballot in 2013.

Harvey Schmitt, president of the Greater Raleigh Chamber, said the group will continue in the position it's held for the past generation of lobbying to get school bond issues passed. This will happen even though Schmitt says the group is still disappointed that the school board is moving away from the choice plan.

There's been speculation about what the Chamber would do if the choice plan was delayed or dropped.