A Teacher's Journal: Learning About Student Assignment

Hard to believe, isn't it? I mean, no single policy draws more attention from the parents and students that I serve, so shouldn't it be required reading for a guy like me?

Feeling poorly prepared to answer this year's inevitable rush of questions, I spent Thursday morning in a session studying the student assignment policy and listening to the logic behind reassignment as explained by Chuck Delaney---Assistant Superintendent for Growth and Planning.

The first surprise for me was that the actual policy is incredibly approachable. The entire document is only two pages long and there was no hint of the intimidating language that so often makes intelligent conversations about critical issues impossible between us commonfolk. After ten minutes of reading, I finally understood the foundational beliefs behind a policy that I originally knew little about.

If you haven't read it yet, you should! Check it out here.

The next misconception dispelled for me was my long-held belief that our district's student assignment policy is primarily driven by efforts to ensure economic diversity across our 153 schools. Easily the most newsworthy aspect of redistricting---and one that I feel ensures that all schools have access to highly accomplished teachers---I honestly thought that the only reason we moved thousands of students each year was to balance the proportion of free and reduced lunch students in each building.

This belief has bled into nearly every conversation about reassignment, hasn't it? Just today, the morning news I was watching said something like, "Wake County prepares to move thousands of students again, all in the name of diversity." Dawn Graff of Wake Cares went even further in this interview with News 14 Carolina, saying:

"Diversity trumps education in Wake County. I think parent concerns are at the bottom of the list, diversity obviously is at the top of the list. While some diversity may be good, diversity at all costs, diversity above parental participation is destructive."

As it turns out, maintaining diversity is only one of six factors taken into account when moving students in Wake County. I found out on Thursday that the list of factors taken into account when making student assignment decisions also includes:

Facility Utilization: The student assignment plan will seek optimal utilization of each school's long-range capacity and, whenever possible, reduce utilization of mobile or modular classrooms that cause a school to operate at more than the approved long-range capacity.

Alignment With The Magnet Schools Program: The student assignment plan will include a review of the extent to which the systemwide objectives of the Magnet Program are being achieved.

Grade Structure: The student assignment plan will adhere to K-5, 6-8, 9-12 grade organization whenever possible with consideration for moving groups of students together across levels.

Stability Of Assignment: Nodes will remain assigned to the schools at each level (Elementary, Middle, High) for at least three years before being considered for reassignment, whenever possible.

Distance: Proximity of nodes to assigned schools will be considered, and no student should travel more than the maximum time established by Board Policy 7125.

After looking over this list, I suspected that facility utilization---rather than diversity---has probably been near the top of the list in Wake County's reassignment decision making. After all, we've added tens of thousands of students and opened literally dozens of new schools in the last decade. Simply filling these schools would force our district to move students, wouldn't it?

A bit of digging proved my suspicions correct. Here are three facts that surprised me in this year's proposed reassignment plan:

1. Of the 6,500 students likely to be moved in 2007, about 5,000 are being moved because of the opening of three new elementary schools in Western Wake County. Some students will attend these new schools and some will be moved into the seats vacated in existing schools. (Deciding Factor: Facility Utilization)

2. Between 1,000 and 1,500 students are being moved to ensure diversity. That's less than 20% of the students in the current version of the student assignment plan. (Deciding Factor: Populations of Students With Higher Needs)

3. Over half of the students being moved in 2007 will actually attend schools that are closer to their homes. (Deciding Factor: Distance)

Do any of these facts make reassignment easier for neighborhoods affected by next year's plan?

Heck no! There's nothing better than the synergy of a school embraced by its community---and reassignment often prevents that synergy from ever fully developing.

But knowing that the decisions made around student assignment are far more sophisticated than I ever expected---and discovering that factors supported by most members of our community (decreasing the distance that children must travel to attend school and reducing the number of mobile units used as classrooms) are often of primary importance to district planners---has helped me to believe in a process that I've always poorly understood.