Wake 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.
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 resegregation.
“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 resegregation, 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.
Once a leader in school diversity, NC retrenches
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.”
