Margiotta out, but runoff will decide school board control

With all precincts reporting tonight, control of the Wake County school board hangs on one race that's heading into runoff after Democrats captured four of the five seats outright.

Based on unofficial returns, Democrats ousted school board chairman Ron Margiotta and held on to three other seats occupied by members of their party. With the board now standing 4-4, the outcome rests on the District 3 contest, which looks to be headed toward a runoff.

Democratic school board member Kevin Hill picked up 49.7 percent of the vote with all precincts reporting, barely falling short of the majority needed to secure the seat. Republican challenger Heather Losurdo, who finished second with almost 40 percent of the vote, said this evening that she would request a runoff election against Hill on Nov. 8.

Susan Evans' victory over Margiotta, who has led the school board since the Republicans gained the majority in the 2009, is a stunning upset. Evans picked up 52 percent of the vote in Southwest Wake's District 8, which leans Republican.

Democratic board member Keith Sutton cruised to an easy victory in District 4 with 81 percent of the vote.

Jim Martin picked up 67 percent of the vote in District 5 to beat Cynthia Matson.

Christine Kushner picked up 59 percent in the four-person field to win in District 6.

Today's elections came at the end of the most expensive and likely most contentious school board campaigns in Wake County history.

A blitz of TV commercials in the last days of the campaign saw hard-hitting ads aimed at school board chair Margiotta and his opponent, Evans. Many of the mailers and ads came not from the campaigns themselves, but from groups that under election law are supposed to operate separately from the candidates.

The balance on the Wake County school board after the new board takes office in December will likely have a profound effect on the future of the schools system and its long-debated assignment plan.

Previous administrations had attempted to balance school populations, based first on race and later on families' economic background. The board that came to power two years ago discarded the use of diversity as a factor in assignment and made other changes to longstanding policies.

When voters in District 8 went to the polls today they had the choice of retaining Margiotta, a Republican, or moving to a different philosophy with his Democratic opponent Susan Evans. The elections overall had the potential of overturning the Republican majority, maintaining it, or increasing it. The school board is officially nonpartisan, but split largely along party lines on most important issues.

Republican board member Debra Goldman, who wasn't up for re-election today, remains a wild card who has sometimes voted with the Democrats.

Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/10/11/1558716/wake-school-board.html#ixzz1aZ9OcjyB

Answering Obama's call to action with STEM 100Kin10

10/07/2011 01:08:00 PM

Last January, U.S. President Obama challenged the nation to train 100,000 high-quality science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers in 10 years. Google in Educationdecided to answer his call to action and became one of the founding members of a community of action called 100Kin10.

We shared our plan with U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and his staff in April, who gave us their full support. With this backing, we were able to announce 100Kin10 in June at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) America meeting in Chicago. CGI also identified STEM education as one of its focus areas for its new branch of U.S. Initiatives.

This past week, 100Kin10 officially kicked off with 80 partner organizations, all contributing to a threefold mission: to reverse the United States’ decades-long decline in STEM subjects, to ensure that all children have the basic STEM literacy to be full participants in our economy and democracy and to enable U.S. students to address the most pressing national and global challenges.

Google has made commitments to increase the supply of high quality teachers and retain excellent STEM teachers. Specifically:

• Working with The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT to create a high-profile recognition program for the top 5% of STEM teachers nationwide and are well on our way to this.
• Inviting districts nationwide to join us at Google for talent academies that will facilitate and fund HR pilot strategies for education.
• Working with university faculty training future teachers throughout California to integrate educational technology across curriculum and scale the practice by funding research on the topic. To that end, we established the Google Faculty Institute this August and have already funded nine pilots across the state.

We believe every student should have access to high quality teaching and educational opportunity. We also recognize that as a collective, we can better measure our progress and take significant strides toward fulfilling the commitments the Department of Education has made around STEM teaching.

We welcome big challenges and look forward to helping achieve great success with 100kin10 in the months and years to come. For more information on Google’s efforts in education, please visit our education website. 

Expect schools fallout

bwheeler@newsobserver.com

Eastern Wake County, you might be surprised to learn, boasts the state's fourth-largest charter school. Almost 1,100 students attend East Wake Academy, a K-12 campus in Zebulon, and its waiting list approaches 600 students.

That so many parents want in might make a person wonder whether there's something they want out of.

The academy's average three-part SAT score is 1451, below most of the county but higher than Knightdale High, whose 1368 average is the lowest. The academy was recently named a School of Distinction.

Knightdale High also has the county's highest percentage of high schoolers qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch, at 40.4 percent.

And Knightdale High had the county's highest number of teachers requesting transfers last year. Hmm.

Most of Eastern Wake's schools now have free and reduced-price lunch populations nearing 60 percent. Wakelon Elementary in Zebulon has more than 70 percent.

Knightdale's Hodge Road Elementary has an F&R population of more than 70 percent, too. Across the street, 76 subsidized apartments are going up. Brilliant.

Right up U.S. 64, Wendell has the county's highest percentage of subsidized affordable units at more than 11 percent of all housing.

Know how much subsidized housing western Wake has? In Morrisville, that'd be 0. Apex? Cary? Each has 1 percent.

We used to have a school board that tried, not terribly successfully, to mitigate the imbalances of our housing patterns by keeping the numbers of poor children assigned to one school as low as possible. It recognized that high-poverty schools are challenging schools, where many children arrive ill-prepared with myriad needs that can burn out teachers quickly. And it realized that wasn't good for the children or the county.

Now we have a board that wanted to make "neighborhood" schools the priority, even though that can create high-poverty schools that can lead those neighborhoods to decay when many residents with the means leave.

The current board opened Walnut Creek Elementary knowing that more than 80 percent of its students would be poor, but it gave the principal a $7,000 bonus and paid for him to fly around the country to recruit teachers willing to work there.

Because that's a model we can afford to replicate 60 times?

Twist any metric you like to make a point about Charlotte-Mecklenburg, which ended diversity efforts and went to "neighborhood" schools 10 years ago. Know what North Carolina's fastest-growing county is? It ain't on the coast.

It's Union County, right east of Mecklenburg. Hmm.

Despite a move toward board consensus this week on a choice-based assignment plan, far too many questions remain. And the answers will depend on the outcome of Tuesday's school board election.

Johnston County might want to get ready.

Next week: In 1997, when I sent my older child to a magnet school, I wasn't leaving Knightdale schools; I was helping a downtown school. An amazing group now works to make Knightdale's schools first choice for all residents.

Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/10/07/1545924/expect-schools-fallout.html#ixzz1aL6b9XC
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