Wake School Board Takes First Steps Towards Changing Student Assignments

By Steve Sbraccia, NBC17

The newly elected school board is beginning to keep the promises it made to parents regarding school assignments.

Thursday afternoon, a newly formed student assignment committee met for the first time to address assignment issues.
"This will include keeping most of our existing year-round schools as they are for the most part, and this will include keeping most of our magnet schools for the most part," assignment committee Chairman John Tedesco said.
In its first steps Thursday, the committee acted on a very limited, narrow set of requests, leaving a lot of the big changes still to come.
"We'll use the next nine to 15 months to build our new assignment process," Tedesco said.
As its first order of business, the committee looked at school-specific node changes based on parental comments from last month's community engagement meetings.
"We're making small changes at this time," school board member Carolyn Morrison said. "A lot of the things we did today are not final."
The assignment committee includes a number of parents, who will help the board members draft recommendations that will create neighborhood schools.
Elected board members say those recommendations are a long way from being created.
"We need to take our time and be very, very diligent and careful in our approach to building a community-based school plan," board member Debra Goldman said.
The school-specific changes recommended by the committee must now go to the full board, which will take a look at them and decide what to do next.