African American opposition to diversity policy

You get to oversee the student reassignment plan. You have to figure out how to convert schools to a year-round calendar. And you determine how many new schools have to be built in a bond issue that will raise property taxes.

It's all in a day's work for Chuck Dulaney, who recently accepted the newly created position of assistant superintendent for growth and planning.

"There aren't good schools and bad schools in Wake County like people think of in other places," Dulaney says. "That's because we have a commitment to have a district full of healthy schools that are interrelated and not isolated from each other."

It's a tough job, but keeping Wake's schools healthy is in harmony with Dulaney's lifelong goal of promoting social diversity.

"They [Dulaney and his wife, Donna Olsen] are very socially conscious," says Ellen MacMillan, past president of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh, where Dulaney is a member and a past president of the congregation. "They both feel a very strong obligation to help others and live what they believe."

For Dulaney, 58, his beliefs stem from growing up in the 1950s in the Southern California town of Colton. Despite the town being half white and half Hispanic, he didn't go to school with Hispanic students until high school. To this day, Dulaney regrets not having learned Spanish.

Dulaney said his experiences in Colton convinced him that when he became a father, he'd be sure to live in a diverse community.

It helped lead him to take a job teaching kindergarten in Kansas City, Mo., which was undergoing integration in the 1970s. While there, he met and married his wife, a fellow teacher. But after seeing white flight to the suburbs dramatically impact the schools, they moved to Charlotte in 1981.

"Charlotte was known for its diverse schools," Dulaney recalls. "We wanted to raise our family there."

But over time, Dulaney and his wife became disillusioned with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. Dulaney said it became clear to them that Charlotte was starting to move away from maintaining diversity, a trend that accelerated after a 1999 federal court ruling ended racial busing.

Seeing the trend taking shape, they relocated to Wake County in 1993.

"He really walks the walk and talks the talks," says Karen Banks, who was Dulaney's boss for 12 years as Wake's assistant superintendent for evaluation and research.

By then, Dulaney's beliefs had carried over to his children. Banks recalls Dulaney's son, Ben, telling of how they detected code words from a real-estate agent trying to steer them to a white neighborhood.

"Ben knew we wouldn't be interested in living in an area that had a low percentage of minorities," says Olsen, a former Wake principal who now works in the district's staff development office.

Except for a brief stint as a principal, most of Dulaney's time in Wake has been spent as a researcher.

Banks, who retired last year, says Dulaney was the consummate team player.

When things heat up

Banks recalled a time in the mid-1990s when they ran into problems scoring tests because the computers were overheating in a trailer with a malfunctioning air conditioning system. Banks and Dulaney went to Home Depot to purchase sprinklers which they used to hose down the trailer to cool it off.

Banks says Dulaney's skills as a communicator have served him well, especially in his role of explaining student test results to schools and the public.

"There are people in my field who are quite brilliant but who can't necessarily communicate with people who aren't as technically oriented," Banks says. "Chuck is the opposite. He can make things sound simple even when they're complicated."

Those communication skills caught the attention of Don Haydon, associate superintendent for auxiliary services, who recruited Dulaney last fall for the new job of overseeing growth and planning. He reports to the superintendent, and receives an annual salary of $105,944. Technically, he doesn't set policy -- that's the school board's job -- but he has considerable influence as someone who frames the key planning issues to present to the board and the public.

"It's reassuring to the board and the staff to have someone there looking at all the data and making sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing," says Patti Head, chairwoman of the school board.

This is one of the most critical times in the district's history.

Wake is experiencing record growth, with 42,000 students expected by 2010. To fill new schools and ease crowding, administrators want to reassign 10,258 students to different schools this fall.

Critics have long complained that the district doesn't do enough long-range planning to minimize reassignment, or at least give parents more warning. Dave Duncan, president of Assignment By Choice, a group critical of Wake's assignment policies, says it's a good sign that the district has created the new position. But he says the test will be what Dulaney does with the job.

Dulaney says the district's long-range planning efforts are hampered by not getting enough money for school construction.

But it may be possible, he says, to give parents earlier notice about reassignment. For instance, he says, the district should be able next year to identify the neighborhoods likely to be assigned to the new Heritage High School in Wake Forest, scheduled to open in 2009.

Dulaney isn't backing off the district's goal of trying to limit the number of students at each school who are receiving federally subsidized lunches. It's based on research showing that all students suffer when a school has too many low-income children.

"Our district was very smart early on to recognize, before there were legal challenges, that it's not an issue of mixing students by race but by family income," Dulaney says.

Dulaney acknowledges that the district's record growth and the county's concentrations of high poverty and low poverty are complicating diversity efforts. One remedy, he says, would be for municipalities to require more mixed-used development.

"We have areas of the county where much of the population is highly affluent, and we have areas where many are living in impoverished neighborhoods," Dulaney says. "How can we address that?"

It's a job that's going to push Dulaney into the public eye and keep him away from home. It's something his wife has accepted.

"It's important to be able to explain to people why we as a community need to do something for the greater good," Olsen says.