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.”

Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata is not ruling out the possibility of providing bus service to students who are losing transportation next year because they're entering a middle school or high schools that's not on their choice list.

As some posters have commented, the initial notice of assignment slips that went out last week for the new choice-based student assignment plan had some surprises. Some families with children entering middle school or high school in 2012-13 were told they wouldn't get bus service.

Wake has repeatedly assured families they can grandfather both their current school next year and their current feeder pattern.

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.

Wake County school officials are touting the grandfathering component in the new student assignment plan but it has some caveats.

The plan does provide grandfathering with transportation if you want to stay at your current school until you complete that grade span. The plan goes on to say that you can be grandfathered to stay in the remaining schools in that feeder pattern if you don't want what's on your list of choices.

The potential problem is you may not get transportation to go along with the grandfathering for that feeder pattern.

Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata contends that the new student assignment plan is one that ""offers the best opportunity for success for all of our students."

In an op-ed piece today, Tata promotes the new plan while criticizing the old node-based system's lack of stability and "well-intentioned but largely unsuccessful effort to level poverty rates of schools." The piece comes out at a time when some new school board members and people in the community say Tuesday's vote should be delayed while leaders in the business community say it should go forward.

"This proposal will provide the stability and choice Wake County parents seek while focusing on student achievement and providing all Wake County children with access to a world-class education," Tata writes.

The new Wake County student assignment plan was presented to the school board today but there's some question on when the public will see the full details.

Staff showed the board how the new interface will allow families to search by their address their options in the plan. But staff said a search function might not be available online for the public until after the Oct. 18 board vote.

Staff is downplaying potentially not having it up until after next week's public hearing and the board vote because of the grandfathering provisions for existing students.

Click here for the online story.

The spinning is going on about how much transportation costs will be impacted by Wake County's new student assignment plan.

School administrators said Tuesday that it could could cost five to 25 additional buses because of the grandfathering that will be employed over the next few years as the plan is phased in. Administrators said they expect costs to drop below current levels once the grandfathering of current students ends.

In a blog post Wednesday, Matt Ellinwood of the liberal N.C. Policy Watch cited the transportation analysis to mock critics of the old diversity policy.

CORRECTION

The blog post was written by Matt Ellinwood.

How far should grandfathering be extended in the new Wake County long-term student assignment plan?

Both the blue and green plans would guarantee that everyone who is already in a school for 2011-12 gets to stay there in 2012-13 and through completion of that grade span if that's what they want.

But that doesn't automatically extend to the existing feeder patterns. So a student who completes that grade span would not necessarily feed into the same middle school and high school that they'd have gotten in the 2011-12 school year.

The green plan may not be the more popular choice as Wake County's new student assignment plan but it's got some pluses.

As noted in today's article, the green plan would be an effort to improve the current node-based student assignment system. The improvements to the current system, the continued busing for diversity and the continued use of base assignments mean it has some backers.

The green plan would seek to reduce how often students are reassigned. You would be reassigned no more than once in each grade span.

Were the student reassignments approved by the Wake County school board this year part of a "pattern of racially motivated moves of Black and Hispanic students?"

That's the contention made by the UNC School of Law's Center for Civil Rights in a memo it filed last month to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. The memo focuses on the 2011-12 moves to help buttress the arguments of racial animus made in the civil rights complaint filed by the NAACP against Wake.

(Thank you to the Wake Education Partnership for providing this link to this report.)