Wake County school board John Tedesco hit on a wide range of topics during an interview today on the Bill LuMaye Show on WPTF.

After calling him "one of the heroes," LuMaye asked Tedesco about the opposition "using race and fear" to block the school board majority's actions. Tedesco agreed they were using fear while touting increased minority placement in advanced classes, lower suspension rates and cutting the budget (so far) without any teacher layoffs.

"The opposition is most afraid that we're going to show that conservative leadership can make public education successful once again," Tedesco said.

The Wake County school system doesn't come off looking too good in a recent  CNN news report by Soledad O'Brien.

Wake is used as the example for the segment called "the return of school segregation" that aired multiple times last week on CNN. O'Brien says Wake schools were "fully integrated" under the old diversity policy and that critics of the move to neighborhood schools "worry that schools in poor neighborhoods will be neglected."

"'Neighborhood schools' means students attend school closest to where they live," O'Brien says. "A black neighborhood means a black school, a white neighborhood, a white school."

Wake County school board member John Tedesco's colleagues weren't joking when they repeatedly said he was charged up on caffeine when he gave a fiery speech at last Thursday's Northern Wake Republican Club meeting.

During the speech, Tedesco praised the board majority's actions since December 2009 in "revamping public education." He also ripped into liberals, including what he called their "unholy trinity" of the NAACP, the Great Schools in Wake Coalition and Raleigh FIST.

"They will try and scare people," Tedesco said of the opposition. "People use fear. These are cowards who understand that anger can be power as long as there is a victim on TV. So they will strike fear."

Wake County school board chairman Ron Margiotta issued a call for help in this fall's elections during last Thursday's Northern Wake Republican Club meeting.

Most of Margiotta's speech focused on the actions initiated by the board since December 2009. But Margiotta closed his speech by pointing to the stakes for this fall's school board elections when he will be running for re-election while also hoping to pick up at least one of the Democratic seats.

"I think it's important that we recognize that the campaign from those that will be out there again will be an attempt to return to the old practices of moving kids around for the sake of socioeconomic diversity," Margiotta said. "And we can not go back to those programs. It's important that we elect candidates that are committed and will stay with their commitments and remain committed and follow through with the programs we've been able to initiate."

The Wake County school board has racked up $67,113.71 so far in legal bills defending the district against the various complaints filed or supported by the state NAACP.

According to page 1 and 2 of this handout presented during last week's budget work session, Wake has compiled $154,298.61 in legal bills dealing with the Open Meetings lawsuit, the federal civil rights complaint and the AdvancED review.

School officials are hoping insurance will pick up $87,176.90 but Wake is rapidly reaching its insurance cap. This means the district would pick up a larger share of any new legal expenses.

Wake County school board members have a month's reprieve before meeting with investigators from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

School board attorney Ann Majestic confirmed that next week's scheduled interviews with board members were postponed at OCR's request. She said they'll now come back to Raleigh during the first week in May.

OCR was in town in early March to interview Superintendent Tony Tata, other school staff members and members of the disbanded school board student assignment committee.

OCR, which is going through the latest Wake response letter, is investigating the complaint filed by the state NAACP.

You can credit the attorneys at Tharrington Smith with coming up with the new data linking student performance with busing distance in Wake County schools.

As noted in today's article, school board attorney Ann Majestic had requested the data from school staff in the past month to confirm whether minority students account for the majority of those who are bused involuntarily at longer distances. Once that was shown, she asked staff to add in academic achievement into the data.

Majestic said the reason for the request was that the state NAACP is alleging that eliminating the diversity policy would have a disparate impact on minority students. In response, she wanted to see if they could see if the old policy had a disparate impact on minority students.

Cash Michaels and the state NAACP are questioning the validity of the data cited by the Wake County school system to justify to federal investigators why they dropped the diversity policy.

In a blog post today on an article that will appear in the next issue of The Carolinian, Michaels points to how Wake earlier in the month said it couldn't provide data to the feds on the number of kids bused for socioeconomic diversity. In light of that, Michaels asks how there are "detailed percentages of students who are bused starting on page 30 of the 46-page report."

"But what is this data based on if just three weeks ago, Wake School System officials couldn’t even give OCR the total number of students bused for diversity for the past three years in the first place?" Michaels writes.

Cash Michaels is using the AdvancED report to lash into the Republican majority on the Wake County school board as having no plan to help high-poverty schools that would result from ending the diversity policy.

In a blog post Thursday on the fifth part of his series in The Carolinian on the new Walnut Creek Elementary School, Michaels focuses on a section in the AdvancEd report that accused the board majority of having no plans to help high-poverty schools.

"When Board members were asked how they would ensure that schools with a significant population of low achieving students would be supported, there were no solutions or plans offered," according to the report. "High school principals noted deep concern that the new [neighborhood schools] policy would significantly compromise their ability to meet the needs of students.

Nearly one year after the first protester was arrested for disrupting a Wake County school board meeting, there's no sign in sight of the situation being resolved.

As noted in today's article by Thomas Goldsmith, the nearly 30 people arrested at school board meetings between last March and August are waiting for disposition of their cases. While the Wake County District Attorney's Office says it's not unusual for misdemeanor cases to be on the docket after a year, prosecutors also don't want the arrests to turn into a show trial.

The issue is that the state NAACP, which has moved to combine all the arrests into one case, wants the issue argued in open court. They want to turn the arrests into a de-facto trial on the end of the diversity policy.