Today's Wake County school board work session agenda looks packed.

Topics include rejoining the National Schools Boards Association's Council of Urban Boards of Education (CUBE), the superintendent search process, reviewing the student assignment plan and dealing with crowding at Panther Creek High School.

Let's start with CUBE, the group that gave Wake an award in 2009 for the socioeconomic diversity policy. School board chairman Kevin Hill has called accepting that award "one of the proudest moments in my long career with the Wake County Public School System."

UPDATE

The Democratic board members all said at the work session that they support rejoining NSBA and CUBE, pointing to the benefits of joining a national professional organization that represents school districts.

School board attorney Jonathan Blumberg said it would require a formal vote at an action meeting so Hill said it would be added to the Oct. 16 meeting.

Click here for the handouts for today's work session, including for rejoining NSBA and CUBE.

A flash poll from the conservative Civitas Institute found that the majority of respondents opposed the Wake County school board's firing of Superintendent Tony Tata.

According to the results released Thursday, 59 percent of the 400 registered voters contacted said they disapproved of the firing. Only 28 percent said they approved. Thirteen percent weren't sure.

Tata also had an higher approval rating than the school board.

Without explicitly saying that Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata's job is in jeopardy, school board member John Tedesco pretty much made it clear that's what is happening.

In an interview Monday afternoon on the Bill LuMaye Show on WPTF, Tedesco said he can't comment on specifically what was discussed at Monday's closed session because it's a personnel issue. But he added "people can infer what they want at that point but unfortunately I can't comment any further although I'm sure I would like to."

LuMaye asked whether any of the Republican board members would provide the vote needed for Tuesday's (today's) meeting to add it to the agenda as opposed to waiting until next Tuesday's meeting when the Democrats only need a simple majority.

Aside from round two of efforts to fire Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata, you'll also have today the first official effort by the school board's new Democratic majority to modify the student assignment policy.

As noted in this earlier post, the school board's policy committee will go over revisions to the student assignment policy, the school transfer policy and the school capping policy. Expect a lot of discussion on whether staff's proposed wording on adding achievement back into the policy goes far enough or if the more detailed wording suggested by committee chair Jim Martin is preferred..

One of the questions is how quickly the committee will move to adopt any policy revisions to send to the full board. Normally the committee is two majority members and two minority members, but ex-officio members Kevin Hill and Keith Sutton can vote to ensure a favorable policy recommendation.

While the minority members will likely want to slow the pace down, the majority members are under a relatively timeframe as they need to get the policies passed before they can adopt the new assignment plan.

This week marks what could be a potentially major week in the history of Wake County student assignment.

As noted in today's article, the school board's policy committee will meet Tuesday to begin discussion of rewriting the student assignment policy to reintroduce diversity as one of the components. On Saturday, the school board will go over the 2013-14 draft student assignment plan that could potentially be rewritten to reflect the diversity changes.

One of the questions the school board will face is how to word the diversity component in the assignment policy. Should it be a general statement, as proposed by staff, or a more explicit document that would have a variety of income and achievement targets?

The Great Schools in Wake Coalition is mobilizing to get the new Wake County student assignment plan to include the diversity-related assignments.

In an email message dated Sept. 12, GSIW chairwoman Yevonne Brannon tells people that her discussions with school board members was "not encouraging." Brannon writes about a "board member who wants what we want but is too weak to push for it and too afraid to step up to the plate, because he is worried about community push back."

Brannon writes that "another board member who doesn’t seem to 'agree' about how to fix diversity-how to have balanced schools.....he seems to believe kids can choose out. After some discussion he agreed to 'think it over.'"

The cat will be out of the bag today, but was there a conspiratorial reason behind efforts by Wake County staff and the Republican school board members to get out the draft assignments now?

In a blog post Thursday, Bob Geary of the liberal Independent weekly writes that the changes that the Democratic board majority plan to make to the student assignment policy should drive the assignments and not the other way around. This means changes to the diversity component of the policy.

"The only reason for putting a list of assignments out now, before Policy 6200 is addressed, would be if (Superintendent Tony) Tata wants to highjack the decision about diversity before the board majority can act," Geary writes. "That is, dictate what the policy can or can't say by putting his own plan in first."

Bob Geary is defending efforts by the three new Democratic members of the Wake County school board to delay public release of the new student assignment base maps.

In a blog post Wednesday for the liberal Independent weekly, Geary singles out board members Susan Evans, Christine Kushner and Jim Martin and says they were right for insisting that "the diversity piece (be) given form" before releasing the assignments.

"Letting the staff publish its online list of base schools by addresses — a list that would be preliminary at best, if only because no board member has even seen it yet, let alone thought about all the ways it needs to be changed — would've been a serious blunder," Geary writes.

"That was Tata's intention, apparently, to let parents start looking up their assignments on Friday. Talk about putting the cart before the horse."

The draft summary of Wake County's new student assignment plan seems to promise a lot of things to different people.

As noted in today's article, the plan promotes proximity by noting that "base assignments will be made at one of their proximate schools to the extent possible." It also says that "residential areas and subdivisions proximate to schools and representative of the students already attending the schools" were used.

For those concerned about diversity, administrators say "in the establishment of the base school attendance area, student performance data was used when an overcrowded or under enrolled school was adjusted."

More to come later, but a few more details are emerging about Wake County's new draft student assignment plan.

An outline of the plan presented to board members shows that attendance lines were drawn for the 2013-14 school year so that "base assignments will be made at one of their proximate schools to the extent possible."

Staff says that when drawing up attendance lines they took into account student achievement to make schools representative of the students now attending. Schools that are 10 percentage points below the district's average performance composite would get additional resources.

UPDATE

Click here for the online story.

For those who don't want to wait until Tuesday morning, click here for a summary of the plan that was provided to school board members.