The Wake County school board will deal with a variety of items at today's meeting, including whether to provide transportation to all rising sixth- and ninth-graders going to their feeder schools this fall.

During the work session, staff will give an update on how many of the preassigned students still don't have transportation and what can be done to accommodate them. The vote on the issue, requested by board member Jim Martin, will come at the regular meeting.

In response to board member Debra Goldman's complaints that Martin was being given more consideration than her for today's meeting, the board will also deal with her concerns about board and district transparency.

A coalition of liberal groups is urging the Wake County school system to halt plans to open a pair of single-sex leadership academies next year.

In this memorandum sent Thursday to Wake Superintendent Tony Tata and school board members, the groups argue that approval of the academies was rushed through without enough input or review. The groups also oppose having single-sex schools and the requirement that students at the academies participate in the Junior ROTC program.

“Instead of spending precious funds on the proposed single-sex academies, spend them on improving and expanding alternative educational programs for struggling students,” says the memo.

The memo was signed by the Great Schools in Wake Coalition, Advocates for Children’s Services, the YWCA of the Greater Triangle, the Coalition of Concerned Citizens for African American Children, the North Carolina chapter of the ACLU and CHOICES — a group that’s criticized JROTC programs.

Here are a few more tidbits from today's press conference with Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata.

Tata said he's been reviewing capacity figures and thinks they can handle the requests from families who don't like the new feeder patterns. He said one thing they're still reviewing is the transitional capacity figures for schools.

“I feel like that where we have some of these points of concern that the parents that are proximate and feel that their feeder pattern may take them away, there is enough space for the numbers of students that want to get into their more proximate school,” Tata said. “Now will that happen in every case? We don’t know.”

Wake County's two new single-gender leadership academies are undergoing some changes before they open the doors for the 2012-13 school year.

As noted in today's article by Thomas Goldsmith, Wake is now looking at partnering with Peace University to house both schools on their campus. The earlier plan was to have the male academy at the Longview School site and the female school at Raleigh Charter High's former space at Pilot Mill.

Wake will now only require that ninth-graders take Junior ROTC instead of having all grades in the program.

Wake County school leaders have hired a new area superintendent and named the person who will lead a new single-sex school for male students.

On Tuesday, the school board hired Kevin Hobbs to fill the vacant position of Area Superintendent for Central Wake, covering a number of Raleigh schools in and around the Beltline. Hobbs has been the assistant superintendent for leadership and development in the Houston Independent School District since 2010.

Although Hobbs spent much of his career working in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, he was a teacher at Garner High School from 1993 to 1995. His salary will be $120,000 a year.

UPDATED TO INCLUDE HOBBS' SALARY