Discussing the impact of magnet and year-round schools

Tuesday's discussion about Fox Road Elementary highlights the challenges and limits that the current assignment policy faces in Wake.

For those who don't want to read the whole post, I'll run off some of the main points from Tuesday's facilities committee meeting. Staff is reviewing the draw areas for magnet and year-round schools, which could affect where current and future application students will go.

For diversity reasons, some magnet schools were deliberately left with empty seats this school year. For diversity reasons, an effort to encourage more low-income students to apply for year-round schools may have backfired, at least at Fox Road Elementary.

For those who are patient, here's how things unfolded.

Fox Road was chosen for a more detailed focus because the high number of middle-income students who've left the school have sharply increased its percentage of low-income students.

Look at this handout from Tuesday's meeting to give you a start.

There was a sharp spike in the number of people from Fox Road's base who applied for magnet and year-round schools in 2007-08. That's also the year in which a lot of Wildwood Forest Elementary students were reassigned to Fox Road.

Looking at the magnet totals, you'll see fewer students got accepted this school year from Fox Road.

(AC KI means accepted for kindergarten. AC Not KI is for applicants accepted for other grades. AZ KI is for kids who got in because of sibling priority.)

Staff explained that in past years, applicants from non-priority applicant schools such as Fox Road were often able to get seats in magnet schools over the summer. This took place when magnet principals feared they wouldn't have enough kids to keep their alloted teachers. When the priority pool was exhausted, it got opened up to everyone else.

But this year, Laura Evans, a growth and planning senior director, said they tried to do a better job at not filling seats over the summer with non-priority applicants even if meant leaving seats empty.

Moving to year-round schools, you'll notice a spike this year in the number of applicants accepted from Fox Road.

Asst. Supt. Chuck Dulaney explained that this year they had tried to increase the number of low-income applicants to year-round schools by changing the selection criteria.

In 2008, the selection was based on the node and base school both being 5 percent above the system average for F&R.

This year, it was based on the node and base school both having an F&R percentage above the county average of 33 percent.

This is where Fox base parents may have benefited. The school is well above the system average for low-income students.

Dulaney said what happened at Fox Road is that they got middle-income applicants who applied from high-needs nodes. The F&R percentage of Fox's year-round applicants was 17 percent.

"We probably pulled students out who were not from high-needs families who were from high-needs nodes," Dulaney said.

Dulaney said this is a problem that's not exactly uncommon.

"The problems of middle income students migrating to year-round schools has long been a problem," Dulaney said. "It’s not a problem we’ve figured out how to solve, and it’s a problem that manifested itself this year at Fox Road."

Wake's problem is that it can only look at node-level data. It's not allowed to look at the F&R percentage of an individual student who has applied for a seat.

Dulaney called Fox Road an example of an "assignment puzzle." While Fox Road doesn't have the space to handle all the kids from its base, Wake would prefer that more low-income students leave than middle-income ones.

Dulaney said that if all the base returned, they'd have to reassign 300 to 400 students out of Fox Road.

"It's a quintissential example of how hard it is to assign students to their closest school, keep schools balanced and offer choice to families," Dulaney said.

Dulaney and board members stressed that they're not talking about forcing application and transfer students to return to their base schools.

But Dulaney said his staff is reviewing the draw areas for the magnet and year-round schools. He could present new draw areas to the board in November or December.

Dulaney said they'll look at things such as whether a particular school gets too many or too few applicants.

The issue here is you're applying to a program and not to a specific school. So if they change which year-round school covers your area or which GT magnet school is in your area, you've got a problem.

They'll let you stay, but possibly without transportation. You can also go to the new school or return to your base school.

Wake redrew several draw areas for this school year.

As part of the review of draw lines, school board member Lori Millberg suggested making River Bend Elementary the year-round application school for Fox Road. It's currently Durant Road Eleentary, which has a much lower F&R percentage than either River Bend of Fox Road.

Millberg said making River Bend the year-round choice for Fox Road would be a "win, win" situation.

Aside from the potential draw area changes, the outgoing board doesn't appear to be set to make changes to the selection lottery. Board member Patti Head said they should share all this data with the new board members.

“The new board that’s seated in December will very much be interested in these new reports," Head said.

It's more likely that the new board will go to a random selection process instead of the weighted one now in place.