The Wake County school board announced one principal appointment tonight and filled a new central office position.

Hilton Trent Evans will become principal of Reedy Creek Middle School in Cary with a salary of $93,422. He has been principal of Reedy Creek Elementary since 2007.

Ruth Steidinger was appointed to the new position of senior director of academic programming and support. She's currently senior director of middle school programs.

Information wasn't immediately available about the new position, which board member Jim Martin cited for him voting no.

It's going to take another month before Wake County school board members begin exerting a say on controversial proposed grading changes such as dropping the use of extra credit and limiting the penalty for work handed in late.

The school board's policy committee was set to begin discussion Tuesday about what grading issues to move from R&P and into board policy. This would allow the board to cut back or potentially block staff from implementing some proposed changes.

The committee ran out of time and agreed to discuss the grading policy and R&P on Aug. 28. But there were again some sharp discussion between board members and staff about the grading changes.

How much of the proposed changes in Wake County's grading policy should be decided by the school board as opposed to the staff?

As noted in today's article, questions about what's a board decision and what's a staff call permeated Thursday's discussion at the student achievement committee meeting. It's making it look like that if the grading policy is changed, it will have more of the board's input into how it will be implemented.

Click here for the revised grading policy and revised R&P presented at the meeting. Click here for a handout showing grading practices in other districts.

Speaking of virtual schools, Wake County school administrators are looking to broaden the opportunities for high school students to take academic enrichment courses.

At last week's Wake County school board policy committee meeting, staff presented changes they're working on to the district's dual enrollment policy and its R&P. The policy governs how high school students can take supplementary courses at other secondary schools or institutions of higher education to get academic credit.

A big proposed change would be to end the monopoly on non-secondary schools having to be accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) for students to get credit from them. Wake would now say that accreditation could come from other regional equivalents to SACS.

Some Wake County school board members want to have more of a direct say on proposed changes to the way grades are given to students.

Most of the contentious points of a proposed change in Wake's grading practices are in the R&P that administrators would use to implement board policy. That includes the banning of the use of extra credit, allowing retests to replace scores and limiting the penalty for late assignments.

But school board attorney Ann Majestic said today that the board could move items from R&P into the grading policy revision to determine what it considers to be the "non-negotiables" for staff to consider. That caught off guard administrators who thought the changes were in their purview.

Is the new common core math curriculum too rigorous for elementary school students to be accelerated to take middle-school math?

As noted in today's article, most of the Triangle High 5 school districts are reacting to the transition to the common core by holding off on math compacting until middle school. In the Wake County school system, this means no replacement for the eliminated 5th/6th-grade compacted math class and no longer allowing elementary school students to go to a middle school to take math.

It created a mini-stir on PAGE of Wake County's Facebook page last week about rumors of Wake suspending acceleration. Wake is clarifying that this only applies to single-subject acceleration under the new math placement policy.

The leadership of the Wake County school board may have changed, but staff is still advocating changes that would eliminate classroom behavior from academic grades.

As noted in today's article, staff came back with the same recommended changes that stalled before the prior board in August. Staff is seeking the new school board's approval to go ahead with this revised grading policy and new R&P.

During Thursday's student achievement committee meeting, board member John Tedesco was the main proponent of the changes. Board member Jim Martin was the main critic.

It looks like there's support for at least partially returning to letter grades on report cards in Wake County elementary schools

The school board's student achievement committee voted today in favor of a section of this draft grading R&P calling for letter grades to be used on report cards in third-, fourth- and fifth-grades. The committee also told staff to use a 10-point grading scale for those grades with an A being 90 to 100, a B being to 80 and 89 and so on.

That's different from the seven-point grading scale used in middle school and high school. The committee discussed moving to a 10-point scale in middle school. They have to leave the seven-point scale in place for high school because that's mandated under state law.

The proposed move to "standards-based" grading will be the main topic at today's first meeting of the reconstituted Wake County school board student achievement committee.

Ruth Stedinger, senior director of middle school programs, will give the committee an overview of the grading review and the recommendations that have been made. Recommendations such as reducing the value of homework, counting retests and letting students hand in work late caused the prior board to put the idea on hold.

The Coalition of Concerned Citizens for African American Children has been advocating Wake to implement the recommendations.

The grading review has gained new attention since the Panther Creek High cheating scandal. Panther Creek has been one of the schools that been pursuing the grading changes on its own, such as not giving zeros and allowing students who've cheated to take alternative exams or assignments.

It took eight months, but the Wake County school board was finally able to agree on passing a middle school math placement policy.

As noted in today's article, the policy got over the hump when staff proposed a number of changes to both the policy and the placement criteria to win over the support of Democratic board members Christine Kushner and Keith Sutton to form a majority with Republicans on the issue. Click here for the adopted policy and here for the revised placement criteria.

"We raised our concerns and staff came up with some good suggestions to them that it was enough for me to support the policy," Kushner said.