It looks like you can add the Forest Ridge High site to the list of battles that will divide new and old school board members starting in December.

As noted in today's article, the current board members, with the exception of Ron Margiotta, told staff to go ahead with plans for using the Forest Ridge High site. But Chris Malone said Wake should be prepared for a change in that plan when he and other new board members take office.

"They should have stopped today," Malone said. "We're going to push ahead and make them stop it."

Get ready for some overcrowding in parts of the county now that assignments to Forest Ridge High, Rolesville Middle and Walnut Creek Elementary have been put on hold.

As noted in today's article, the school board voted Tuesday to delay the assignments to those three schools by two years because the recession has delayed when they'll open. There will be consequences.

Not assigning students to Forest Ridge High until 2012 means that Wake Forest-Rolesville and Wakefield high schools will need to keep their off campus ninth-grade centers until at least then.

The question of who has the longest bus rides was also on the minds of school board members on Tuesday.

As noted in today's article, staff stressed that voluntary magnet kids account for a majority of the longest bus rides in the district. But students who are bused for diversity also are in the group with the longest rides.

Bob Snidemiller, senior director for transportation, explained that the longest 5 percent of bus ride times have an average one-way ride of 64 minutes.

Reggie Lucas will give up basketball and take football coaching job.

It looks like Wake will clean up a board/staff disconnect that limited how much high school students could carpool to school.

As noted in today's article, staff is revising high school parking guidelines to drop the wording that students can't share campus parking spaces. School board member Patti Head will ask her colleagues today to sign off on the revisions.

The changes became needed because the school board's efforts to encourage student carpooling hit a snag this school year.

The Node 325 people have been more successsful, it seems, at getting dropped from the reassigment plan than other bigger groups.

At the urging of Kevin Hill, the school board agreed to not reassign Node 325 from Wakefield middle and high schools over to Wake Forest-Rolesville. The people in that node had been concerned they'd be overlooked because of the larger groups pushing for change in the area.

In contrast, the Bedford folks are still slated to go from Wakefield to Heritage High.

UPDATE

The board has finished reviewing the reassignment plan. Thursday's work session has been cancelled. Next up is the final vote on Tuesday.

The school board has backed staff's suggestion for dealing with northern Wake high school reassignment.

The board would move nodes 243.1 and 243.5 (both by the US 1/401 split) from Millbrook High to Wake Forest-Rolesville High instead of to Wakefield High. These nodes would help raise Wake Forest's percentage of LI kids to make it more comparable with other area high schools.

In addition, the board would delay the Millbrook to H6 and Millbrook to Knightdale moves to 2011 instead of 2010. Asst. Supt. Chuck Dulaney said those moves could be delayed again if magnet enrollment doesn't rise as fast as hoped.

The changes would leave Millbrook at around 2,000 students.

All these nodes will be able to speak at a public hearing Tuesday. 

We'll have to wait until later in the week for the school board to definitively deal with Millbrook High and the rest of the northeastern Wake high schools.

School board members agreed that the reassignment plan would move too many students would be moved out of Millbrook. The problem is they're not sure what's the right balance to leave Millbrook at without leaving other nearby schools too underenrolled.

Millbrook parents argue that it's unrealistic to move so many students out and expect they'll be replenished so quickly with magnet students.

The school board has decided not to make any change in the assignments for H6 in northeastern Wake.

But with funding to build H6 still uncertain, stay tuned.

"The money is not in our pocket yet," said Rosa Gill, chairwoman of the school board.

WF-Rolesville falls to Jack Britt 27-16 in a 4AA semi-final game in Fayetteville.