Wake County school officials announced today that the school system’s official enrollment grew by 1,893 students from last year’s total.

School officials say the enrollment on the 20th-day of classes was 139,599 students, compared to 137,706 students at that same time last year. School districts use the 20th-day figures to report an official enrollment to the state for funding purposes.

The school district based the budget on having 140,012 students. Whether county commissioners ask for money back from the school system for those 413 students is debatable.

One of the charges raised during the school board campaign is that abandoning the diversity policy will require a sharp increase in taxes to pay for a system of neighborhood schools such as what's used in Charlotte.

Well, the funding gap this year between the Wake and Charlotte-Mecklenburg school systems is a lot smaller than normal because of the recession. The previously large gap is now down to $3.9 million.

UPDATE: CORRECTED SIZE OF CURRENT GAP

A not so cheerful year for traditional-calendar schools will start tomorrow.

As noted in today's article, students are returning to schools where class sizes will be up and some elective courses have been dropped. Some teachers are still out of a job and supply budgets have been sliced.

"Our parents understand where we are with this economy," said Chip Mack, the new principal of Davis Drive Elementary School.

Wake Superintendent Del Burns is mounting another defense of the school district's decision not to rely too much on federal stimulus dollars.

In this week's journal, Burns says the stimulus dollars are "not a magical solution that will make everything like it was." This comes as outside groups, including NCAE and Gov. Perdue, are saying that Wake should use the stimulus dollars more to save teacher jobs.

Burns stresses that the stimulus dollars are set to expire in two years.

Wake school leaders are bashing the state for forcing them and other school districts to make unpopular budget cuts such as raising class sizes and reducing teacher assistant positions.

No new positions were eliminated today as they were already anticipated in the budget. But today's board vote makes the cuts official.

At issue is $225 million in discretionary K-12 state education cuts. Wake's share of those discretionary cuts is $21.7 million.

Click here for the online story.

Just like I did for Chapel Hill-Carrboro last week, I'm posting some of the state budget reduction numbers for Orange County Schools. These were just released at last night's school board meeting. It's purely informational - the board won't vote on a finalized budget plan until its Sept. 8 meeting.

Click "Read More" to get a rundown of some of the major highlights:

It looks like Wake may have made the right call playing it conservatively with state budget projections.

As noted in today's article, Wake school officials feel they're in good shape to deal with the state budget adopted last week. The state's approximately 4.8 percent funding cut for K-12 education falls in line with the 5 percent figure Wake principals were working on for this upcoming school year.

At this point, Wake isn't expecting to lay off teachers.

Last week, Gov. Beverly Perdue signed the state budget, meaning Chapel Hill-Carrboro must now figure out what to do with the estimated $2.8 million loss they face.

The school board will be discussing details at Thursday's general meeting, but a copy of a tentative plan for the district has been posted on their website.

After the jump, a breakdown of the cuts (according to the posted document) and what the district plans to do to address each:

The "Grade Doctor" won't be making any house calls to Wake County.

As noted in today's article, school administrators have broken off contract negotiations with education consultant Ken O'Connor, who calls himself "The Grade Doctor." Administrators had been hoping to hire him to speak with teachers as part of the district's review of middle school and high school grading practices.

At a cost of as much as $6,000 a day for up to eight days, the contract negotiations had become controversial.

You can expect the school district's teacher hiring freeze to stay in effect for at least two more weeks.

Wake had put in place on Thursday a hiring freeze on middle school and high school teachers and on elementary school teacher assistants. This was done in anticipation of a projected sharp funding cut in the continuing budget resolution.

Yesterday, the General Assembly passed a continuing budget resolution that will allow the state to keep running at 85 percent of the prior fiscal year's budget. The temporary spending bill runs to July 15.

Wake had planned on being at 95 percent of last year's state funding.

It's possible that the final budget adopted by the state will cut education funding by less than 15 percent. But with only 85 percent funding for now, Wake school officials say the hiring freeze is still in effect.