Nancy Caggia, a long-time school system volunteer, says she filed today for the District 9 vacancy on the Wake County school board.

In an interview with Andrew Kenney of the Cary News, Caggia and her supporters pointed to her years of experience in education. She also has endorsements from a bipartisan trio of Cary Town Council members — Gale Adcock, Don Frantz and Jennifer Robinson, according to Frantz.

“I’ve had 14 years of volunteering, from the trenches to the state level,” said Caggia, 53.

Former candidate Lois Nixon says she wants to fill the District 9 vacancy on the Wake County school board.

Nixon, who lost to Debra Goldman for the seat in 2009, told Andrew Kenney of the Cary News that she’s focused on finding compromise in the school board’s meeting room.

“I would like to turn down the heat a bit, if I can help to do that,” Nixon said.

In a blast from the past, Bill Fletcher is hoping to return to the Wake County school board by filling the vacant District 9 position.

Fletcher became the first, and at the moment still only, applicant on Friday for the Cary seat that Debra Goldman resigned from Feb. 1. Fletcher said in an interview Monday that he wants to bring his “institutional knowledge” to the at-times tumultuous school board and help build community support for public education

“I can’t do anything about what's in the past,” Fletcher said of the recent school board turmoil. “I can only contribute toward improving education for our kids and community.”

The Wake County school board passed the voluntary desegregation resolution it needs as part of it federal magnet grant application, but in the process it led to a discussion about achievement at magnets and the programming options at non-magnets.

At the last meeting on Feb. 5, the board considered this voluntary desegregation resolution. Approval was required as part of the $10 million in federal magnet dollars Wake will request to start up three new magnets and to revamp the themes at two schools.

School board member Deborah Prickett came to the discussion with a long list of notes to raise her concerns about approving the resolution.

It's not an understatement to say that Thursday's Wake County school board discussion on the student assignment policy was a free-wheeling discussion.

The variety of topics discussed, such as how explicit to make an achievement goal and what to say about socioeconomic diversity, set the stage for the long process to follow to come up with a revised policy.

Unlike most committee meetings, nearly every board member including new appointee Tom Benton attended. That's a sign of how important the discussion was viewed.

Can the Wake County school board successfully harmonize policies on student assignment, equity and closing the achievement gap?

Understandably, much of the focus of today's joint meeting of the school board's student achievement and policy committees will be on the review of the student assignment policy. They'll go over these handouts from the Sept. 25 committee meeting, which talks about developing an assignment plan to avoid high concentrations of low-performing students in a school.

The details of the achievement component, along with whatever modified version of a socioeconomic component that doesn't use school lunch data, would need to be finalized before it could be used in the 2014-15 plan.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST

The hot topic of revising Wake County's student assignment policy will be back on the agenda Thursday.

The agenda for Thursday's joint meeting of the student achievement and policy committees includes discussion of the three pillars of Policy 6200 — achievement, proximity and stability. This is the prelude to the changes that the board majority would make to reinstate diversity into assignment.

The board had been working to get the revision approved before the 2013-14 plan was adopted but slowed down when it opted to use the 2011-12 maps as the baseline for this fall. But if they want to incorporate achievement explicitly into assignments for 2014-15 and beyond they need to revise the policy first.

The committees will also discuss an update on revising the grading policy and an update on a new equity policy and achievement gap policy.

Here's a recap of the interviews of Wade Minter and Shinica Thomas for the District 1 vacancy on the Wake County school board.

Minter found multiple ways to bring up his support for Wake's old socioeconomic diversity policy even when he wasn't asked questions on topics that touched on the subject.

The first reference was on how Minter wold meet the needs of all students a at a time of limited resources. He said that the diversity policy is a good one that helps parents who don't have as much time to work with their children or the means to provide resources to their kids.

Prospective Wake County school board applicants were grilled today on a range of topics, such as their views on magnet schools, student assignment, the superintendent search and the challenges facing Eastern Wake County.

Each board member asked the same question to the applicants. They asked the question from Debra Goldman as well, even though she resigned Friday.

Here were the eight questions:

Here's a recap of the interviews of Tom Benton and Don Mial for the District 1 vacancy on the Wake County school board.

Benton was the most direct and explicit of all the applicants so far on his views on diversity, student assignment and magnet schools. His familiarity with those issues from having spent most of his 32 years in education in Wake showed.

Benton said he supported using student assignment to promote diverse schools and also supports the magnet school program. But at the same time he said they need to balance the concerns from parents about reassignment, including low-income students who are being moved.