The revised student assignment policy drew some widely differing reaction Tuesday between the Wake County school board majority and minority board member Deborah Prickett.

As noted in today's article, policy supporters praised the revised policy with its balancing of student achievement, stability, proximity and operational efficiency as something "that anybody in this country would be proud of."

But Prickett charged it was a policy aimed at low-income and low-performing students that would move them out of their neighborhoods and wouldn't really help them succeed academically.

Here's a quick recap of today's Wake County school board meeting.

The board voted 7-1 to approve on first reading the revised student assignment policy. Board member Deborah Prickett was the lone dissenter. John Tedesco was absent tonight.

The board also voted, apparently unanimously, to approve a budget request asking for an $8.3 million increase from the county. Prickett questioned creating the Office of Equity and Diversity.

The board also gave initial thumbs up approval to a revised $940 million list of school bond projects. Staff was able to come up with money to fund more renovations, particularly in Garner, by making some cuts, using projected proceeds from sale of school properties and using $43 million in school bonds being issued by the county.

Is creating an Office of Diversity and Equity something that the Wake County school system should look at exploring?

As noted in today's article, the school board told staff on Tuesday to revise the budget proposal to come up with up to $200,000 to create this new office. Board members say this office, along with the revisions in the student assignment policy to minimize concentrations of low-income and low-performing students at schools and the new equity policy will help promote equity for students.

School board chairman Keith Sutton has been the big backer of creating this new office, which is modeled on one in the Guilford County school system. It's because of Sutton that staff developed a business case for creating the new office even though it wasn't part of the original budget request.

The Wake County school board and the Wake County commissioners may have agreed in principle to a school construction dollar amount, but they're still split on how to spend the money.

As noted in today's article, both boards agreed Thursday to target $900 million for the amount with the details to come later about what would be funded. As Thursday's discussion showed, the issue of how much to spend on renovations vs. new schools is a sticking point between the two boards.

Joe Bryan, chairman of the board of commissioners, resumed Thursday the questions he had at the last meeting about why some renovations have such high dollar amounts.

The lobbying and negotiating over what projects to include in the next Wake County school construction bond referendum is already in progress.

As noted in today's article, the scenarios presented Wednesday range from $609 million to $2.3 billion. It's understood that the $2.3 billion, which lays out all the district's needs, isn't going to happen.

The question is which projects to still fund in a reduced bond amount.

Should the Wake County school system spend as much as $90 million in the next school construction bond issue on technology?

At Wednesday's school board facilities committee meeting, staff outlined proposals for $54 million to establish a "classroom baseline" and $36 million in network systems. Click h here for the network needs.

A lot of the discussion was around the classroom technology piece, where the goal in the next bond is to reach a ratio of one device (laptop, iPad or tablet) for every three students. This would involve 50,000 devices for $25 million.

The word inconsistent was said more than a few times Thursday by members of the Wake County school system's new school safety task force after getting an overview of the current security practices.

As noted in today's article, task force members were surprised to hear about the lack of a uniform standard of security measures at the 169 schools. For instance, the majority of schools don't have a security officer or computer system for managing visitors and a large minority have few or no surveillance cameras and outdated locking systems.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison, co-chair of the task force. “We’ve got a lot of inconsistencies.”

If you haven't' read it yet, the Wake Education Partnership had an assessment of last week's discussion by the Wake County school board on the student assignment policy.

This appeared in Thursday's issue of In Context, the WEP's e-newsletter:

The framework for a long-term approach to student assignment that is noticeably different from past years is beginning to take shape in public conversations among school board members.

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