Wake County Schools Superintendent Tony Tata apologized today for the delays in releasing updated student assignment results on Thursday while also continuing to say that most families like the schools they're getting.

During his press conference, Tata said he took "full responsibility" for problems that first delayed the posting of the results on Thursday and then led to the site being shut down for three hours. He said they hadn't encountered this problem in rehearsals in which the front end of the system where people logged in wasn't connecting to the back end where the results were located.

"I personally apologize to parents who needed faster service and better information," Tata said. "However, as I did mention, we did work into the night to fix the problems."

Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane is speaking out against the new Wake County student assignment plan, and Superintendent Tony Tata says they make changes to address her concerns.

As noted in today's online article by Thomas Goldsmith, McFarlane said the new assignment plan is beginning to hurt efforts to recruit businesses to the area. McFarlane said she is starting to hear that some businesses have second thoughts about coming here.

“With us trying to recruit businesses to come here, we are trying to compete with municipalities all around the globe,” said McFarlane at today's joint meeting of the school board and Wake County Mayors Association. “The big thing is, ‘Where are my kids going to go to school?’ And there’s no answer. That’s a deal breaker.”

The Wake County school board voted tonight to acquire two sites to relieve overcrowding at Garner and Panther Creek high schools.

The school system will pay $1.75 million to buy the Garner Towne Square 10 theater, located at 2600 Timber Drive. The theater, which closed in 2010, will be converted to operate as an off-campus ninth-grade center for the nearby Garner High.

The school system will pay $12.38 per square feet to lease a 77,574-sq. ft. office building at 3700 Pleasant Church Grove Road in Morrisville. It would be a six-year lease, starting July 1, with a 3 percent annual escalation. The building will be converted to operate as an off-campus ninth-grade center for Panther Creek High.

The issues of stability and base assignment came up during Friday's presentation of Wake County's new student assignment plan to the Raleigh Regional Association of Realtors.

As noted in today's article, school administrators touted how the new plan will allow real estate agents to assure families that they will no longer have to worry about student reassignment. But the real-estate agents were concerned about how the loss of base assignments would impact their ability to sell homes.

“This is a hard reset and mental adjustment to make,” said Susan Pullium, a member of Wake’s student assignment task force. “There’s no longer base assignments.”

Walnut Creek Elementary School is still going to be crowded even with the enrollment cap approved for the rest of the school year.

As noted in today's article, the Wake County school board unanimously adopted a cap to send new students to Creech Road Elementary. The cap will stay in place for the rest of the school year unless Walnut Creek's enrollment, now at 929 students, drops below 862 students.

"Walnut Creek is hemorrhaging and we needed to stop the bleeding," said school board member Keith Sutton, who had requested the cap. "We did that with the cap."

Two different pictures are emerging about the situation taking place at the new Walnut Creek Elementary School.

As noted in today's article, Wake County Schools Superintendent Tony Tata acknowledged that an enrollment cap is needed at Walnut Creek to deal with overcrowding. But Tata, pointing to the additional resources provided to the school, says that Walnut Creek is "on the right track."

In contrast, Cash Michaels calls the overcrowding situation a "crime." He accuses Tata and the Republican board majority "of literally turning their backs on the growing problem there."

UPDATE

Click here for an updated version of the article in The Carolinian that Cash Michaels wrote about the crowding situation at Walnut Creek.

Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata said today that he will ask the school board on Tuesday for permission to cap enrollment at the new Walnut Creek Elementary School in Southeast Raleigh.

Instead of just 780 students as planned, Walnut Creek now has more than 930 students. This comes amid all the scrutiny about Walnut Creek, where concerns that it would open as a high-poverty school with many low-performing students led to a mass infusion of additional resources.

"We wanted to make it a high demand school and we did," Tata said at today's press conference.

Capacity is, in the words of Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata, "the coin of the realm," now that a choice-based student assignment plan is in effect.

Since the new plan is supposed to avoid overcrowding schools, this means limiting how many students can be accepted. Wake will be using transitional capacities as it grandfathers in students for the next few years.

Click here for the 2011-12 Facilities Utilization Report approved by the school board this month that lists the capacity figures for all 165 schools.

In addition, Tata has directed all the principals to verify by grade level the number of classes and number of seats. This will be done before integrating the capacity figure into the assignment plan.

It's now in the hands of the Wake County Board of Commissioners to decide on reallocating unspent 2006 bond money to help fund the $130.3 million school construction program recently approved by the school board.

The commissioners are being asked today to approve in concept the plan that would fund projects such as a new high school in Apex, a new elementary school in Wake Forest, two single-sex leadership academies, the Hilburn K-8 conversion, off-campus ninth-grade centers for Panther Creek and Garner high schools and modulars at several other high schools.

Critics of the school board majority focused most of their complaints on the leadership academies, the Hilburn project and the Panther Creek ninth-grade center. In the case of Panther Creek, school officials say the ninth-grade center is needed to deal with crowding while critics complained a relatively new school was getting more money while older ones like Apex High were not.

Today's vote is for first reading only. The meeting starts at 2 p.m. in the  Wake County Courthouse, Room 700.

Is a K-8 school conversion the answer to Hilburn Drive Elementary's underenrollment and the lack of capacity for northwest Raleigh middle schools?

As noted in today's article by Chelsea Kellner, Wake Count Superintendent Tony Tata will present a plan to the school board on Tuesday to convert Hilburn to a K-8 campus for the 2012-13 school year. It would be the first combined elementary and middle school in Wake since before the 1976 merger.

“This is an idea that would save money and be very value-added to this community,” Tata told Hilburn parents at a meeting at the school on Wednesday.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST