Do schools in Wake issue long-term suspensions for students more quickly than they should?

As noted in today's article, that's a concern raised by some groups as Wake has one of the higher long-term suspension rates in the state. It's more of an issue now that Wake is proposing to eliminate the alternative programs for long-term suspended students in favor of offering them online courses from home.

Click here to view the 2007-08 statewide school-by-school suspension data. Click here to view the 2003-04 through 2006-07 statewide school-by-school data.

The new statewide school crime and suspension figures are out.

Wake is touting how its rate of reported crime and violence of 14.55 acts per 1,000 high school students is lower than the state average. Wake is also touting that its short-term suspension rate of 30.4 per 100 high school students is lower than the state average.

What's not so nice is the 4.5 percent increase in Wake's long-term suspensions. But expulsions are down.

I suspect a lot of you folks are interesting in school-by-school crime stats. Those aren't part of the main report. You can find them here.

An Enloe High School assistant principal was mugged on campus this morning before classes started.

Click here for the latest incident, which comes three days after Enloe's PTSA had a meeting on school safety. It's the latest in a recent series of assaults and robberies that have plagued Enloe, leading to extra police and school security.

Raleigh police say they'll beef up patrols even more after today's incident. They say they'll increase patrols of the area both before and after school.

The timing isn't great with the magnet application period a little more than three weeks away. Whether these incidents have any impact remains to be seen.

Fear not, Dookies: That blaring siren you may hear this month is only a test.

Duke this summer is joining a number of universities installing outdoor alarm and alert systems to use in case of campus emergency - a response to last year's massacre at Virginia Tech. 

The university has been installing the systems in recent months and will be testing them in July. Aaron Graves, Duke's security chief, told me this week the specific times of the tests aren't yet known, but will be done throughout the month.