Wake County school board member will race off from today's joint meeting with county commissioners to attend the student achievement committee meeting.

The agenda shows the committee will hear a presentation about alternative learning centers and in-school suspension. They'll then review school discipline data, focusing on final 2011-12 data and the first semester of this school year.

The committee will also review the recommendations from the School Health Advisory Council. It was tabled from the last meeting.

The Wake County school board's student achievement committee is scheduled to discuss today the latest recommendations from the School Health Advisory Council, including the controversial one on banning the sale of unhealthy foods.

Since the SHAC report came out last week, school board members have been getting a steady stream of comments from booster groups warning that restricting what they can sell at concession stands will harm their ability to raise funds to support athletic programs.

The response was so much that school board vice chairwoman Christine Kushner, also chair of the student achievement committee, quipped last week that they should invite the booster groups to the superintendent search feedback meetings.

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

The hot topic of revising Wake County's student assignment policy will be back on the agenda Thursday.

The agenda for Thursday's joint meeting of the student achievement and policy committees includes discussion of the three pillars of Policy 6200 — achievement, proximity and stability. This is the prelude to the changes that the board majority would make to reinstate diversity into assignment.

The board had been working to get the revision approved before the 2013-14 plan was adopted but slowed down when it opted to use the 2011-12 maps as the baseline for this fall. But if they want to incorporate achievement explicitly into assignments for 2014-15 and beyond they need to revise the policy first.

The committees will also discuss an update on revising the grading policy and an update on a new equity policy and achievement gap policy.

How many Wake County schools need to change their bell schedules this fall to meet the new state requirement for 1,025 hours of instruction?

Deputy Superintendent Cathy Moore told the school board's student achievement committee last week that they're still gathering data from individual schools. The schools are checking their schedules to see how many hours they currently have.

Wake is going with 1,025 hours instead of 185 days for the 2013-14 school year after the General Assembly said districts could use either option. It used to be 180 days and 1,000 hours.

Wake needs to know before the bell schedules are adopted by the school board in March. Any schools that are short will need to tack on some additional time to their school day.

It looks like families at Wake County's traditional-calendar schools won't have to worry about 2014 spring break being cut short to use as weather makeup days.

Currently, the school district's 2013-14 traditional-calendar schedule has March 31-April 2, the first three days of spring break, as possible makeup days. But Wake school administrators want to revise the schedule to move the three makeup days to the end of the school year in June.

Deputy Superintendent Cathy Moore told the school board's student achievement committee last week that the district plans to take advantage of changes in the state's calendar law approved last year by the General Assembly.

The education reform package passed last year by the state legislature drew plenty of red flags at Thursday's Wake County school board student achievement committee meeting.

As noted in today's article, school board members said that issuing an A through F grade for every school will humiliate schools and won’t have much value. School leaders also say now requiring districts to hold summer reading camps for third-grade students who fail the state reading exam is an unfunded mandate.

“We are charged to make sure we have the best education system for our students and teachers," said school board member Jim Martin. "If something is coming down the track that doesn’t help students and teachers, then we have the obligation to get off the track before the train hits us.”

How will the Wake County school system be affected by the changes, those approved and those still to come, from the Republican-led state government?

One of the items on today's school board student achievement committee agenda is an overview and discussion of SB 795 " The Excellent Public Schools Act." Elements of the act that were incorporated into the budget last year were praised by Republicans and criticized by Democrats.

Among the elements that went into effect, over the veto of former Gov. Bev Perdue, are creating an A-to-F grading scale using test scores to evaluate all schools and requiring third-graders to pass the state-end-of-grade reading test to be promoted.

Pencil in Dec. 4 for what could be a lively discussion about whether the Wake County school system should hold early release days on Wednesday or Fridays.

As noted in today's article, the school board's executive committee has put the early release issue on the agenda for the Dec. 4 board work session. The board's Democratic majority has the votes to push through a change but whether they want to risk any appearance of a scaled-back return to Wacky Wednesdays/Wake Wednesdays remains to be seen.

Aside from the argument from supporters that Wednesdays would be better for promoting student achievement, you're also likely to hear that they're only talking about six Wednesdays per student and not every week.