Wake County Passes Re-Segregation Resolution, Back To Jim Crow, Where's Obama?

Wake Co. School Board Passes Neighborhood School Resolution


Amid a conflict-filled meeting that sometimes recalled the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Wake County’s new school board majority took the first step today toward implementing neighborhood schools.

By a 5-4 vote, the board gave the first of two approvals needed to pass a resolution calling for abandoning busing for diversity in favor of assigning students to schools in their community. Supporters hailed it as a step toward providing families more stability while critics complained it would lead to resegregation.

“The board needs to make a determination once and for all about what direction to head,” said school board vice chairwoman Debra Goldman, who co-wrote the resolution.

Critics argued that the resolution violates several board policies, including not giving board members and the public enough time to review the changes before a vote. The resolution wasn’t announced until Friday.

“I want to go on record as opposing anything that could lead to Re-Segregation,” said board member Carolyn Morrison, a member of the minority faction. The approval of the resolution came after multiple attempts by the board minority to defer the resolution or to amend it failed by 5-4 votes.

“It’s totally irresponsible and reckless to consider something of this nature without fiscal implications,” said board member Keith Sutton, also a member of the minority faction. “I’m sick and tired of voting on policy matters without fiscal implications.”

School board chairman Ron Margiotta rejected Sutton’s request to rule the resolution out of order.

Four new board members elected last fall, who joined with Margiotta in forming a new majority on the board, had campaigned on ending the diversity policy in favor of neighborhood schools.

The resolution calls for Wake, the state's largest school system, to be divided into separate community zones, each with year-round and magnet school options. If final approval is given March 23, board members would spend the next nine to 15 months working out the details on the new zones.

The plan would be to phase in the zones over the next three years.

If finally adopted, it would end be the first step toward ending Wake’s nationally recognized policy of trying to limit the percentage of low-income students at individual schools. A Sunday New York Times article reported on the changes being considered in Wake.

Supporters and opponents of the new majority mobilized to pack Tuesday’s meeting.



A group of self-proclaimed “student pirates” gathered outside the board offices to hold a “mock liberation” of the school system in favor of the diversity policy.

The vote came after more than 50 people spoke out in front of a standing-room only crowd. Passions repeatedly flared during the discussion with critics of the resolution making up a majority of the speakers.

“If you expect to go to hell, don’t take our children with you," said the Rev. Curtis Gatewood, who was gaveled out of order by school board chairman Ron Margiotta.

Gatewood, who called Margiotta a “white racist,” refused to stop speaking after his time ran out, prompting security to confront him. After a 10-minute recess, Margiotta allowed Gatewood, the second vice president of the state NAACP, to finish speaking.

Gatewood drew cheers as he left the board meeting room.

As a sign of how heated tensions had become, a Raleigh police officer and a Wake County sheriff’s deputy provided extra security at the meeting.

Although outnumbered, several speakers urged the new board majority to continue ahead with the resolution.

“I’d be absolutely appalled and insulted if someone told me I can’t cut the mustard unless I can get help from the outside community,” said Bill Randall, a black conservative candidate for Congress.

Dawn Bartlett, a parent, said neighborhood schools will be better for families.

“I’m completely in favor of neighborhood and community schools,” Bartlett said. “It will allow me to volunteer in a school that’s not 20 miles away.

Critics of the resolution argued that the board majority didn’t have any data to prove that community schools would work.

They charged it would lead to Re-Segregation.

“In the words of George Wallace, do you want your legacy to be segregation now, segregation forever?” said Samuel Greene, a retired Wake principal.

The Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, led supporters of the diversity policy in singing “We Shall Overcome,” a song associated with the civil rights movement.

Barber, who has previously threatened to sue the school board over Re-Segregation, said he’s putting the board on notice that he considered the resolution to be a violation of the constitutional rights of African American children.

”Your plan is wrong. It’s wayward. It will make things worse and you know it,” Barber said. “Data doesn’t support it. Morality doesn’t support it.”

Matthew Brown, a Raleigh backer of the diversity policy, said going to neighborhood schools would lead to unsuccessful high-poverty schools that are typical around the country.

“If you have high poverty schools, you know these children won’t have a chance for success in the world?” Brown said. “Are you prepared to do this to the children?”

Margiotta, Goldman, John Tedesco, Deborah Prickett and Chris Malone voted for the resolution. Sutton, Kevin Hill, Morrison and Anne McLaurin voted no.





Once A Leader In School Diversity, NC Retrenches



When North Carolina's Wake County decided to do away with race-based busing to desegregate schools, local officials came up with a novel solution to maintain balance.

The new method of assigning students by their socio-economic background rather than race helped to keep campuses integrated. Adopted in 2000, it quickly became a blueprint for other school systems.

That policy, however, has never sat well with many suburban parents -- often white and middle class -- who argue that the student assignment plan sends their kids too far from home. And a new school board, swept into office by those vocal parents, appears poised to scrap it in a vote scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.

The issue has brought the term ''segregation'' and the weight of history into recent school board meetings. Some parents and students around the state capital are now imploring their newly elected leaders to back away from their plan to drastically alter the diversity policy.

''Please preserve the New South. Don't take us back to the Old South,'' parent Robert Siegel told the school board.

Reversing the diversity rules would follow a cascade of similar shifts around the South, and particularly in North Carolina, which once was a model of desegregation. Now the state is increasingly starting to mirror an era many thought had past: On one side of the state, in the coastal town of Wilmington, an elementary school of several hundred students has just one who is black. On the other, in the banking hub of Charlotte, a primary school of similar size has just one student who is white.

In the military town of Goldsboro, starkly divided schools have led civil rights leaders to accuse local school officials of creating ''an apartheid district.''

Ron Margiotta, the new board chairman in Wake County, vowed that the change there was in the interest of students because it would allow parents more options and refocus families on the schools in their neighborhood. He bristled at any suggestion that the move had something to do with race.

''It's something that offends me,'' Margiotta said in an interview. ''Nobody's going to go back to Jim Crow days.''

The diversity policy in Wake County became a popular model in 2007, when the Supreme Court limited the use of race in how districts assign students. Its current policy sends students to schools to achieve socioeconomic diversity, which also improved racial diversity by frequently sending lower income black children from the city's center to predominantly white schools in the suburbs. Some schools also created magnet programs to attract students from other neighborhoods with advanced courses in foreign language, science and other topics.

Margiotta said the busing program has not helped minority students and has distracted from focusing on stronger education policy.

''What we're doing isn't working,'' Margiotta said.

But Ebere Collins, a black mother of two students in the district, said her son travels one hour by bus to get from his home in Raleigh to a middle school in the suburb of Wake Forest. While the trip is long, she feels it helps her son mingle with people outside of the neighborhood and ensures that all students have access to the same resources.

''Mix them up, let them experience each other,'' she said. ''By scattering them around, they will enjoy the benefits other people are enjoying.''

Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor who studies busing and civil rights, said the entire South has been resegregating for the past 20 years -- which he deemed ''a gigantic historic tragedy.'' He praised Wake County's current policy and warned that a renewed focus on neighborhood school assignment will be most damaging to children who come from poor or uneducated families because those students benefit most from integration.

''What it does when you go to 'neighborhood' schools is it means that you put the kids who are most affected by school opportunity in the schools with the weakest opportunity,'' Orfield said. ''That's a tragedy.''

If the diversity policy is pulled back, Orfield said, Raleigh can expect to see some of the same impoverished, troubled schools as Detroit, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago.

In Charlotte, the site of a groundbreaking Supreme Court case that led to three decades of busing to ensure racial balance, schools have spent much of the past several years resegregating after getting federal court approval to allow parents more choice of where to send their kids.

At Beverly Woods Elementary, just north of the Quail Hollow Country Club that hosts a namesake PGA Tour event, 79 percent of the students are white. A few miles up the road, at Montclaire Elementary, only 4 percent of the students -- just 19 out of 450 -- are white.

There are no plans in Charlotte to revisit busing. Pamela Grundy, a parent in Charlotte who has decried the divisions within the school district, said leaders in Raleigh should take notice.

''The lesson of Charlotte is that desegregation will go away so quickly. Once you lose it, you can't get it back,'' she said.


View Larger Map

Sources: NC Policy Watch, McClatchy Newspapers, NY Times, Youtube, Google Maps