School administrators and Wake County school board members agreed to recommend some changes to this version of the student transfer policy during Wednesday's policy committee meeting.

One change is to modify the title of Section B to say "Reasons Transfer Requests May Be Approved by Office of Student Assignment." A similar change is being made to the title of Section C to add in the words student assignment staff.

The wording was added to try to convey to parents that Section B and Section C don't bind the school board when it handles transfer appeals.

UPDATE

Click here to view the policy that will be voted on Tuesday.

Are the new Democratic members of the Wake County school board doing their job to make sure the student assignment plan is ready or are they micromanaging the process?

That was a point of contention between Republican and Democratic board members during Tuesday's review of the assignment plan. The first half of the meeting dealt with a look at how the school system is handling its outreach efforts, particularly informing parents about their options and getting them to register if they're new.

Some tense words were exchanged over the issue of whether school registrars and data managers are able to do the job of getting students registered and informed about their options.

Walnut Creek Elementary School is still going to be crowded even with the enrollment cap approved for the rest of the school year.

As noted in today's article, the Wake County school board unanimously adopted a cap to send new students to Creech Road Elementary. The cap will stay in place for the rest of the school year unless Walnut Creek's enrollment, now at 929 students, drops below 862 students.

"Walnut Creek is hemorrhaging and we needed to stop the bleeding," said school board member Keith Sutton, who had requested the cap. "We did that with the cap."

The issue of whether siblings could be accommodated on Track 4 decided which Wake County year-round schools would make the move to a single track for the next two school years.

Click here for this handout that shows how the 14 underutilized year-round schools were evaluated by staff. Inability to accommodate siblings was cited for eight of the nine schools as to why a move to a single-track year-round calendar wasn't considered feasible.

Laura Evans, senior director for Growth and Planning, said inability to accommodate siblings reflected challenges caused by moving multi-track year-round schools to a single-track calendar.

Were the student reassignments approved by the Wake County school board this year part of a "pattern of racially motivated moves of Black and Hispanic students?"

That's the contention made by the UNC School of Law's Center for Civil Rights in a memo it filed last month to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. The memo focuses on the 2011-12 moves to help buttress the arguments of racial animus made in the civil rights complaint filed by the NAACP against Wake.

(Thank you to the Wake Education Partnership for providing this link to this report.)

The 2011-12 Wake County student reassignment plan is now officially in the books.

The school board agreed today to reassign 136 additional students. When combined with the 3,500 moved on Feb. 1, you've got more than 3,600 kids on the move for this fall.

Among the moves approved today was to send 15 students from school board member John Tedesco's neighborhood from Creech Road Elementary to Aversboro Elementary.

Is it time to fill all of Wake County's magnet seats by random lottery?

That's the position articulated at last week's school board meeting by Jennifer Mansfield, a longtime critic of the magnet selection process and a leader of the Wake Schools Community Alliance. She urged the board to eliminate the guidelines which give priority to applicants from crowded schools.

Mansfield argued that the crowding component should be removed to give applicants an equal shot of getting accepted. Currently, only 10 percent of seats are randomly filled but even that comes with some strings that I'll get into later in the post.

The Wake County student reassignment plan has been reduced to 3,935 students, 768 students fewer than when the board started this week.

On Thursday, the board agreed to several changes, including reversing Tuesday's decision to consider adding the Woods of Tiffany subdivision subdivision to the plan. Only one new node was added.

Click here to view the revised list of nodes in the plan. Wake hasn't updated the plan on its website.

UPDATE/CORRECTION

In addition, the start of the magnet application period has been pushed back a week. It will now start Feb. 21 and end March 7.

The parents of the Breckenridge community of Morrisville have apparently won their victory with the Wake County school board.

The board preliminarily agreed today to drop the reassignment of the 220 Breckrenrdge students from Cedar Fork Elementary to Green Hope Elementary. Breckrenridge parents had heavily lobbied to stay at Cedar Fork.

The Breckenridge students have been at Cedar Fork since the school opened. When the students were reassigned to Alston Ridge Elementary, Cedar Fork was left as the traditional-calendar application school.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST

Following intense lobbying from parents at Daniels Middle School, the Wake County school board has agreed to only reassign 73 out of 170 students into the school.

Citing crowding issues, the board agreed to move in 73 students from Leesville Middle to Daniels. But the board killed plans to move in 97 students from Centennial, East Millbrook and West Millbrook middle schools.

Staff had recommended bringing in those 170 Southeast Raleigh students both to relieve crowding at Leesville and to send kids closer to home.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST