Is it a conspiracy or coincidence that the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is spending a lot of its time investigating various complaints filed against the Wake County school system?

As noted in today's article, OCR has used its discretion to launch investigations of three complaints against Wake in the past two years. The scope of the investigations means OCR is looking at how students are assigned, how they’re suspended, what athletics opportunities they’re provided and whether they’re getting important notices in Spanish.

Depending on your point of view, they're welcome probes or a case of the feds butting in too much into Wake County's business.

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights will investigate allegations that the Wake County school system discriminated against some Latino students by not providing their parents with Spanish translations of important documents.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and Advocates for Children's Services announced today that OCR is acting on the Title VI complaint that the two groups filed against Wake last month. Here's the OCR letter to Wake dated June 27.

“This is good news for all Latino students in Wake County schools whose parents have limited English proficiency,” said Peggy Nicholson, one of the ACS attorneys representing the students in the complaint. “We hope this investigation results in Wake County public schools adopting new policies and practices that better enable all parents to play a more meaningful role in their children’s education.”

Wake County school board chairman Kevin Hill is trying to ease concerns about the school board's recent vote to change the student assignment plan for the 2013-14 school year.

As noted in today's article, Hill said during a Friday meeting with N&O editors and reporters that he's not expecting the return to an address-based plan to result in large-scale reassignment. He stressed the proposed "stay where you start" policy which would allow students to stay at the school they're attending until they complete the grade span.

But Hill also said they're still going to have to reassign people to fill all the new schools that Wake will need to deal with growth.

WakeUP Wake County says the Wake County school system's future "brightens" now that the school board is changing the student assignment plan.

In an email update today, WakeUP Wake says the group is "excited that Wake County will significantly revise the current 'choice' plan, that has already proven to decrease economic diversity in elementary schools."

WakeUP Wake also "thanks" the members of the Great Schools in Wake Coalition "for their persistence over the past two years." Great Schools i a project of WakeUP Wake, an officially non-partisan progressive group

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.

Cash Michaels is speculating on whether Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata will do as he's publicly stated that he'll carry out the new student assignment directive.

In an article in The Carolinian out today, Michaels notes that Tata "has had several very public nasty fights with" the school board's new Democratic majority. The liberal Michaels also calls Tata "a conservative Tea Party sympathizer who sources say has US senatorial aspirations in a few years."

"With his heart really not into establishing a base school model with aspects of choice, and elements of stability, proximity, student achievement and diversity, will Tata drag his feet in meeting the 2013-14 school year deadline, or will the retired US Army brigadier general be the “good soldier,” and follow the directive?" Michaels 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.

Wake County Republican Party Chairwoman Susan Bryant charges the school board's Democratic majority "lied" when they said they wouldn't scrap the choice-based student assignment plan.

In Thursday's issue of the Elephant Express and in a press release that day, Bryant focuses back on the fall elections where she says the Democratic board candidates "deliberately soft-pedaled their intent to scrap Tata’s bipartisan parental-choice assignment plan."  Bryant points to interviews that the candidates gave about not making sweeping changes to the Wake County school choice plan.

"The truth is, they are going back to the old plan as closely as the law will allow," Bryant writes. "Each child’s address will be tied to a specific school to be chosen on some sort of socioeconomic basis."