Wake GOP Chairwoman Susan Bryant charges Democratic school board members "lied" about not changing student assignment plan

Wake County Republican Party Chairwoman Susan Bryant charges the school board's Democratic majority "lied" when they said they wouldn't scrap the choice-based student assignment plan.

In Thursday's issue of the Elephant Express and in a press release that day, Bryant focuses back on the fall elections where she says the Democratic board candidates "deliberately soft-pedaled their intent to scrap Tata’s bipartisan parental-choice assignment plan."  Bryant points to interviews that the candidates gave about not making sweeping changes to the Wake County school choice plan.

"The truth is, they are going back to the old plan as closely as the law will allow," Bryant writes. "Each child’s address will be tied to a specific school to be chosen on some sort of socioeconomic basis."

What could be an issue here is when the Democrats said they weren't going to make sweeping changes to the choice plan was whether you thought that applied only to the 2012-13 school year or also to future years.

Bryant also takes aim at how the student assignment directive says the board will look at socioeconomic factors that "may include the use of census data, and/or individual data provided by parents such as income, educational attainment, or other information."

"In other words, the School Board now wants to know how much every parent in the County makes," Bryant writes in the Elephant Express. "They want your returns.  So they can decide which school to assign your kids to.  Are you kidding me?"

It's one of several differences between what's in the press release and the Elephant Express.

The Elephant Express is geared toward Republicans so Bryant brings back the charge of how the Obama campaign targeted the school board races.

"Because the Obama campaign and the national Democrat Party saw the 2011 elections as a preview of 2012, and also saw North Carolina as pivotal to their 2012 success, they turned on the big money," Bryant writes. "We’ll never know how much they actually spent, but we can document about $800,000, and the total was almost surely over a million dollars.  

That was enough to scare and mislead enough voters that they could eke out narrow victories for Kevin Hill and Susan Evans, who narrowly defeated then Chairman Ron Margiotta.  A win for either Margiotta or Losurdo would have kept the Board in Republican hands, and kept the Tata plan in place."

Bryant also tries to rally Republicans even though the best the GOP can hope to do next year is maintain a 5-4 minority. Only Republican-held seats  are on next year's ballot.

"As a practical matter, we’re not going to return the School Board to the control of adults for four more long years," Bryant writes. "We’ll need to win majorities in both 2013 and 2015 to do it.  That is a tragedy, but I don’t see a way to avoid it at this time.

But however long it takes, we must never forget, and never lose our resolve to bring common sense back to the education of the children of Wake County."