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.'"

Next week's Wake County school board schedule is now out and the first work session on the student assignment plan is set for Sept. 29, a Saturday.

After postponing the five public hearings scheduled for the plan, the board  looked at using those dates as work sessions. The posted schedule doesn't mention reusing the Monday and Wednesday that would have held hearings.

But a work session is scheduled for Sept. 29 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the school board conference room, 5625 Dillard Drive in Cary.

Also next week, the school board's policy committee will meet Tuesday to discuss revisions to the policies on student assignment, transfers and enrollment caps. The board needs to adopt the revisions before the plan can be approved.

You can go online starting at 5 p.m. to look up your draft 2013-14 base schools under the Wake County student assignment plan.

There will be a link off Wake's website, www.wcpss.net, that will let you plug in your address to search for your possible base school. You can also go online to read details about the plan and to give comments.

Online comments will be accepted until 5 p.m. on Oct. 19.

UPDATE

8 p.m. update: The link is now live.

7:45 p.m. update: Wake says the data "is almost ready."

7 p.m. update: Wake says that it took longer than expected to load all 600,000 addresses into the system. The search feature could be up within 15 minutes.

5:15 p.m. update: Wake says the system is now loading all the addresses so it's closer to 6 p.m. that the lookup feaure will go live.

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."

After all the ruckus, Wake County families should be able to go online beginning Friday afternoon to see what their possible school assignments will be for the 2013-14 school year.

School board chairman Kevin Hill gave the approval today to school administrators to post the online address lookup feature. Cris Mulder, a Wake schools’ spokeswoman, said staff is finalizing the data and expects to have the information ready on Friday afternoon.

Mulder said the official announcement could come this afternoon or Friday morning on when the address lookup feature will go live. It’s expected that many families of the more than 150,000 students in the district will want to look up the information.

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST

The Wake County Taxpayers Association announced today that it had filed a complaint with AdvancED asking the accreditation organization to investigate the actions of the Wake County school board majority.

The complaint hits on a variety of things, including the private meeting the new board members had with Michael Alves, the post-midnight vote on the student assignment directive and board member Jim Martin trying to arrange an assignment provision for parents going on sabbaticals,  

Several of the allegations deal with the Great Schools in Wake Coalition, from the behavior of some members in the audience of board meetings to charges they've unduly influenced the board majority.

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."

Wake County school board members had some sharp disagreements Tuesday about when to release to the public the new draft base assignment maps, including the ability to go online to search by your address.

As noted in today's article, the three new Democratic board members argued for a delay so they could see the maps first and to keep the comments at a global perspective for now. But all the Republican board members argued that the info should be released to parents as soon as possible.

GOP school board member John Tedesco made the suggestion to delay the public hearings, which had been slated to start Monday, so that the parents could view the maps and have some time to digest the info and give the comments on their particular assignments.

The Wake County school board has put on hold the public hearings on the student assignment plan.

The decision was made tonight after a heated debate over whether to release the assignment maps and online address lookup of base assignments before the first hearing on Monday. Republican board members said the info should be released ahead of time while Democratic board members said doing so wouldn't help because comments would focus on individual assignments and not on the plan as a whole.

Democratic members said that they want to release the maps to parents to get input on that too, but not right now. The hearings will be rescheduled.

Board members from both sides did agree that a proposed Oct. 30 vote on the plan was too soon.

UPDATE

Board members said it would be rushing to hold the hearings next week when there's not enough detail on the plan.

In addition, don't look for the online address lookup feature to be up Friday.

One of the issues raised by Jonathan Blumberg, acting as board attorney tonight, is that the board needs to make the changes to the various policies before the new plan can be adopted.  The board would need to make changes in the student assignment policy and the transfer policy.

Depending on how quickly they want to act, the next policy commitee meeting is on Tuesday, Sept. 25.