Three new principals and two interim principals were announced at tonight's Wake County school board meeting.

Barry Richburg was named principal of Conn Elementary School in Raleigh with a salary of $72,386. He's been an assistant principal at Briarcliff Elementary since last year.

Annice Williams was promoted from assistant principal to principal of Poe Elementary School in Raleigh with a salary of $89,521. She had been principal of Barwell Road Elementary until much of the staff was replaced last year when it became part of the Renaissance School program.

Wake County school administrators want to offer signing bonuses and performance pay to teachers at Walnut Creek Elementary School and the Longview School.

The school board will vote Tuesday on using $442,000 from the Race to the Top grant for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 school years to start Walnut Creek's bonus plan. The new plan would help Walnut Creek "be able to hire and retain the most capable staff members in all positions."

Some critics had argued it was unfair to offer the bonuses at the four Renaissance Schools but not at Walnut Creek when they have similar demographics.

The board will also vote on using $425,000 from a School Improvement Grant to fund the bonus plan at Longview for the next two school years. The plan calls for Longview, which is an alternative school, to "reconstruct" its staff, meaning some current teachers might not return to the school in the fall.

Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata found himself being challenged Saturday by the new school board members on his idea of giving school autonomy based on student achievement.

Tata supports using what's called "managed performance empowerment," a hybrid between giving principals no control and total control over how they run their schools. It's part of his draft strategic plan that he's hoping the board will adopt.

"Called Managed Performance Empowerment (MPE), the theory of action grants flexibility and decision-making authority to schools based on successful performance," says Tata's draft strategic plan. "From a school support perspective, we will measure our school performance based first and foremost on student achievement and place schools along a continuum of performance to best target our support and resources as a district."

Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata said today that he will ask the school board on Tuesday for permission to cap enrollment at the new Walnut Creek Elementary School in Southeast Raleigh.

Instead of just 780 students as planned, Walnut Creek now has more than 930 students. This comes amid all the scrutiny about Walnut Creek, where concerns that it would open as a high-poverty school with many low-performing students led to a mass infusion of additional resources.

"We wanted to make it a high demand school and we did," Tata said at today's press conference.

Eyes around Wake County are focused on how the four Renaissance Model  schools will do this year.

As noted in today's article, the four Renaissance schools got additional resources, such as the money that was used to have a quartet from the N.C. Symphony work with students at Barwell Road Elementary School on Monday.

“We want to focus on everything we can to bring enrichment to their lives," said Barwell Road Principal Sandy Barefoot. “It certainly opens up the world to them.”

Will the disparity between what rich and poor schools get in private dollars increase under the new choice-based student assignment plan being developed for Wake County?

As noted in Sunday's article by Thomas Goldsmith and David Raynor, Wake County schools receive more than $21 million each year in private revenue. Schools like Lacy Elementary raise around $100,000 a year from a non-profit foundation while Creech Road Elementary got $12,738 last year in various private donations.

"It is an equity issue that is hard to address because it's private money," said school board member Keith Sutton.

For some practical reasons, Wake County isn't close to implementing a districtwide pay-for-performance model for teachers.

Wake Superintendent Tony Tata laid out the limitations for districtwide teacher merit pay at last month's school board retreat. Tata said the problem is that EVAAS, which is being used to evaluate teachers statewide, only covers 19 percent of Wake's teachers.

"It's really an insufficient tool for us to evaluate the performance of our teachers," Tata said of EVAAS. "That doesn't mean it can't be made to be a sufficient tool, but if we are looking at,,,moving to some kind of pay for performance model, perhaps in the future, we either need to enhance EVAAS so that it captures all our teachers or we need another method to do this."

The repeated theme at last week's ED task force meeting is that all children can succeed but it's going to take a lot of hard work from the school system to help the students out.

The tenor of the Wake County school board's economically disadvantaged student performance task force meeting was set when this YouTube video of Sir Ken Robinson was shown to a packed room of teachers and principals.

Robinson contends that the current educational system is based on the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and the environment of the Industrial Revolution. He argues that most people don't benefit from that model, creating the plague of ADHD.

The Wake County school board appointed five principals tonight while moving four principals to assistant principal posts.

Gregory Butler was named principal of North Garner Middle School with a salary of $92,707.68. He has been an assistant principal at Southeast Raleigh High since 2009.

Carmen Graf was named principal of Banks Road Elementary School in Fuquay-Varina with a salary of $73,803.68. Graf has been an assistant principal at Timber Drive Elementary since October.

UPDATE

Click here to view the bio sheets.

The Wake County school system will need a new person to help the school board decide on the future of the magnet school program.

David Ansbacher, senior director of magnet school programs, will be leaving to become a principal in Singapore. Since March, he has been a member of the student assignment task force.

Ansbacher's successor will have a myriad of issues to deal with, including recommending which three schools get magnet programs for the 2012-13 school year.