Richland Creek Elementary School opened Monday as the smallest Wake County elementary school in recent memory.

As noted in today's article, Richland Creek opened with 97 students on a modular campus with a a capacity of 368 students. The enrollment would have been lower if not for the decision to also offer fourth- and fifth-grades for families who wanted to keep their children together.

The school only had 34 students on the books in June. But the newcomers who moved in over the summer to the Wake Forest area were steered to the school when they submitted their choice requests.

Patience is a virtue that newcomers to Wake County need as they register their children for school this fall.

As noted in today's article, the implementation of the new choice-based student assignment plan changed the way registration takes place in the Wake County school system. In the past, newcomers could come any time of the year to register at their child's base school.

But since June, newcomers have had to go to Central Office in Cary. Parents are told to expect to spend at least two hours as they go through the process of waiting to register their children and then making the school selection.

UPDATE

Nichols went to Salem on Wednesday. The school notified her today that her son would get track 2, putting him a month behind his new classmates.

Questions about student assignment and choice came up repeatedly during Tuesday's Wake County school board facilities committee discussion on the next school construction bond issue.

As noted in today's article, board members Jim Martin and Susan Evans were concerned by what they perceived as staff placing too much of a priority on parental choice in the proposed list of projects. Especially, they said, because providing choice requires a bigger bond and spending more money.

“We need to have an adult conversation about whether the community is willing to pay to provide choice,” Martin said.

Wake County school board chairman Kevin Hill is pointing to the need to change the student assignment plan for diversity reasons and downplaying concerns the recent vote will negatively impact a looming school bond issue.

In this interview last Tuesday on the Bill LuMaye Show on WPTF, Hill said the reason for passing the student assignment directive was the data they had been receiving over the last month about school demographic trends from the new choice plan. Hill said they were concerned that they could add 10 new high-needs schools with high levels of poverty.

"I've heard the superintendent on record all spring basically say there's going to need to be some changes, there's going to be some tweaks," Hill said. "As a board we've been supportive of the choice plan through the spring, but I think this data was kind of alarming in terms of where enrollment was going at several schools. The superintendent again is on record as saying it's cheaper to keep a school from becoming high risk than to deal with a school once it is high risk."

Wake County's new choice-based student assignment plan is producing some unusual oddities for the 2012-13 school year that opens today with the return of year-round students.

As noted in today's article, Wake has 151,487 students registered for the new school year, 1,000 more than expected. But staff isn't certain how much of that growth is attributable to phantom students who were gaming the choice plan.

Another quirk of the choice plan is that Richland Creek Elementary School only has 34 students registered so far for its Aug. 27 opening. That's far fewer students than it would have opened with under the old base-school assignment plan.

Supporters of restoring diversity to Wake County's student assignment plan have been talking about a recent article on resegregation and school choice in the Winston-Salem Forsyth County schools.

This Sunday article in the Winston-Salem Journal notes how the school district phased out busing for diversity starting in 1995 in favor of "choice zones," which allow parents to choose from among multiple schools. The article says that racial resegregation quickly accelerated in the schools and led to concentrated poverty in certain schools.

"Despite zoned assignment plans offering parents diverse school choices, local schools tend to reflect their neighborhoods," according to the article. "And those neighborhoods, while changing, still reflect the legacy of zoning laws that laid out where black people were allowed to live for much of the 20th century."

Wake County school board members John Tedesco and Keith Sutton painted sharply different views on the issue of choice in student assignment and last week's board vote for staff to develop an address-based plan with a diversity component.

In this interview last Thursday on the Bill LuMaye Show on WPTF, Tedesco said that the move to a choice plan had "changed the culture" of the school system to "put the families first." He said it promoted "free market principles" by causing schools to compete to attract students.

In this interview last Friday on the Bill LuMaye Show, board vice chairman Sutton said that Wake was "too large" to have the degree of choice that was in the choice plan. Sutton said there would be "some significant changes" made when the new plan goes into effect for the 2013-14 school year.

Wake County school board chairman Kevin Hill is taking heat for saying that he agrees with the statement that "'family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the 'wants' of a single family rather than the 'needs' of society."

In a Wednesday blog post for the Civitas Review, the weblog of the conservative Civitas Institute, Jim Tynen writes that "you have to give credit to the chairman of the Wake County School Board for frankness in discussing what’s important." Hill and others have attributed that statement about choice being selfish and anti-social to the Association of California School Administrators.

"Some bloggers see this in the ACSA statement as far left-wing," Tynen writes. "But you don’t have to go that far; it seems to me to be a rather clear, if unusually candid, expression of what liberals everywhere actually think. They believe society comes first."

Wake County school board member John Tedesco is called "statesmanlike" in this week's issue of the liberal Independent weekly.

This article by Bob Geary notes Tedesco's willingness to reach out to the Democratic school board members for compromises on issues such as student assignment. Geary also writes that "around here, Tedesco is viewed as a conservative ideologue," but he's being called too moderate by his opponent for the Republican nomination for state schools superintendent.

"While Tedesco is poison for many Democrats, he's also the only Republican school board member who regularly communicates with any of the five Democrats who now constitute the new board majority, after two years of Republican control," Geary writes.

It looks like one consequence of Wake County's controlled-choice student assignment plan is that it's impacting the racial balance at schools

As noted in today's article, an analysis of projected kindergarten enrollment data for this fall indicates kindergarten classes at 23 schools will see their percentages of white students increase by at least 10 percentage points over the 2011-12 school year. Meanwhile, the proportion of black students at schools with predominantly minority kindergarten classes will rise as well, but not as sharply.

"There were no diversity guidelines,” said education consultant Michael Alves. “Pretty much what you are looking at is the result of parental preference.”

UPDATE

For those who are having trouble viewing the Excel files, I'm adding PDF links. Click here for the 2012-13 projected white kindergarten enrollments. Click here for the 2012-13 projected black kindergarten enrollments.