REV. BARBER TO NEW WAKE SCHOOL BOARD: PUT DIVERSITY BACK IN

                                NAACP PRESIDENT REV. WILLIAM BARBER

By Cash Michaels

            The president of the NCNAACP is urging the new Democrat-led Wake School Board, scheduled to be sworn-in Tuesday, to put diversity back into WCPSS policy, and also into the new school choice assignment plan, to ensure that the needs of the system’s most vulnerable students are met.

            “Why wouldn’t you,” Pres. Rev. William Barber rhetorically asked when interviewed Nov. 9^th, one day after Democrat Kevin Hill won the District 3 runoff race to complete the five-seat Democratic sweep. “If you’re saying you’re not going to have it back as policy, then you’re in essence saying what other folks are saying - that diversity is somehow a bad word and dirty thing, and not good public policy.”

            The civil rights leader also wants the new board majority to follow-through on their promise to take a closer look at Wake Supt. Anthony Tata’s school choice assignment plan, which the board hurriedly approved several weeks ago.

            As District 4 board member Keith Sutton and several others have already said, diversity, or something similar, should be an equal component of the Tata plan to ensure equity in student assignment.

            However, that could guarantee a fight with the now-Republican minority, led by current Vice Chairman John Tedesco, and their backers.            

It was shortly after a Republican majority swept into office in 2009, campaigning on a promise of ditching the previously successful student diversity policy in favor of neighborhood schools, that diversity was officially removed as a element of board policy.

            Board Republicans, led by then Chairman Ron Margiotta, declared that busing for diversity was not only hurting the school system in general, but black children in the system specifically. Republicans suggested, without any empirical data to back them up, that long bus rides from Southeast Raleigh to suburban schools were detrimental for African-American students.

            The GOP rhetoric was to build a case for neighborhood schools, and dismiss any of the national recognition Wake had accomplished per its previous years of academic success through socioeconomic diversity.

            Rev. Barber said the Margiotta-led Wake School Board distinguished itself the moment it took control by immediately, and deliberately, ignoring past proven policy practices of consensus, and research and law, something the AdvancED international educational accreditation agency, which put the board on notice about its behavior, stated.

            AdvancED, to whom the NCNAACP complained to about the Republican majority on the Wake School Board, confirmed in its initial report last March that Margiotta and company dismantled the diversity policy without any empirical data to justify why.

            Indeed, the report continued, the board’s Republican majority consciously denied any evidence of academic improvement for black students, based on the diversity policy, that was occurring during their tenure in office, instead trumpeting their own “data” to the contrary.

            The ultimate concern of AdvancED, the NCNAACP, and others who carefully watched the Wake School Board was that its neighborhood schools plan would result in racially-identifiable high needs/high poverty schools in predominately black Southeast Raleigh.
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       EDITOR'S NOTE - On 12-1-11, the US Dept. of Education released a report of public school districts are underfunding their high poverty schools in communities of color. Click here to read the report.
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        Principals complained, and AdvancEd confirmed, that the GOP-led board had no plans for appropriately dealing with the high poverty schools its neighborhood schools policy created. That fear turned into fact recently, when Wake Supt. Anthony Tata and staff allowed the brand new Walnut Creek Elementary School in Southeast Raleigh - which is 72 percent free-and-reduced lunch and over 50 percent low-performing - to run 149 students over-capacity to 929 for three months, before finally, last week, capping enrollment.

            Tata and the board had to act. With an AdvancED team due back in town this week for a followup investigation on the NAACP complaint, having the Walnut Creek controversy still dominating the headlines would have done more harm than good.

            Barber said the actions of the Republican majority on the Wake School Board set a “dangerous” precedent that if allowed to continue, would have spawned similar recalcitrant conservative-led school boards across the nation, using neighborhood schools as a “wedge issue” to win politically.

“We’re not just concerned with diversity,” he said. “We’re concerned about the negatives of resegregation, because we know with resegregation you get resegregated bodies, budgets, and buildings, instead of all of the sound building blocks of a quality education. We know if you don’t have a commitment to diversity, you’re not going to have a commitment to equity and resources, which means you undermine student achievement.”

The NCNAACP president wants the new board to make a comparison.

“We had a gold standard plan. We had a proven plan. Now what the community is asked to do is accept a hypothesis. Research does not show anywhere where they have used the so-called choice model, that it has performed better than the healthy schools - socioeconomic diversity resource plan that we had. And that’s been our argument all along. Not Democrat or Republican. Show us, the community, how what you are planning to do - do a side-by-side comparison - is better than what you had.”

            Rev. Barber is clear that the “old” socioeconomic diversity plan “had to be tweaked,” and thus wasn’t perfect. Because of Wake’s tremendous growth several years ago, students sometimes found themselves moved from school-to-school, or siblings were separated at different schools. Though the resulting student diversity manifested itself in high academic gains, the constant shuffling of students angered parents, and spurred a growing anti-diversity movement that resulted in the 2009 Republican school board sweep.

            The high growth also diverted Wake schools administrators’ attention from the practices that helped black and Latino students achieve, and after five years of success, those numbers began to suffer as well, something the Republicans politically exploited.

            Barber says the new Democratic school board majority should compare the new school choice plan to the old plan, and empirically show how “what we want is better than what we had,” as opposed to experiment with a new plan that is untested in a school system as large as Wake, which is currently the 16^th largest in the nation.

            “The new board needs to assess how does this plan guarantees high quality constitutional well funded diverse public education for every child,” Rev. Barber said. “Does it ensure that poor children, minority children have access? It has to be done.”

            In fact, when Supt. Tata’s team developed various plans several months ago for the public to evaluate, the final two plans were labeled Blue - a school choice plan; and Green - a node-based plan very much like the old diversity plan, were indeed considered, which the blue plan winning.

            Barber says that comparison didn’t take into account all that the original diversity plan accomplished, and thus, was incomplete.

            He added that in private conversations, Tata said that he would like to see diversity as an element in the new student assignment plan, but the Republican-majority would not allow it, and he had to follow their direction.

            With the change in Wake School Board leadership now, Rev. Barber says the opportunity exists to ensure that the new plan meets the needs of the system’s most vulnerable children.

Rev. Barber noted that even the “father” of the school choice, Dr. Michael Alves, said that diversity must be part of any school choice plan in order for it to work.

            Dr. Alves visited Raleigh over a year ago when the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and Wake Education Partnership brought him in to broker a compromise choice plan. Chairman Ron Margiotta openly rejected Alves’ advise, saying the only diversity in the school board’s final student assignment plan would be the “natural” diversity already there.

            Barber says student diversity, along with the bedrock resources to teach all children effectively, is the formula for success in Wake County schools, even with school choice. Racial resegregation with a lack of resources for students of color, will mean failure, he added.

            The civil rights leader says the NCNAACP will petition to meet again with Supt. Tata, to followup on their first meeting with him earlier in the year. Barber also revealed that the civil rights organization will request a meeting with the new school board once it is situated.

            “We have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests,” Barber added. “We always seek to talk. We want to be a partner moving forward. This is about all of our children.”

Rev. Barber said he would consider attending the swearing-in of the new Wake School Board next Tuesday, but he is still barred after being charged with trespassing twice after demonstrations at the old Wake Forest Road headquarters in 2010. He said that the NCNAACP will “have people there.”

The tone of the 2011 Republican school board campaign, at times, was racial, with fliers picturing Rev. Barber and national NAACP Pres. Benjamin Jealous as black leaders looking to “take over” the Wake School System through the five white Democratic candidates.

            “That’s a throwback to the 1940’s and 1950s, that really, really hard race card,” Barber says. The civil rights leader stayed out of view, as to not make himself any more of a campaign issue.

Rev. Barber expects Tedesco, if he indeed stays on the board (he’s considering a 2012 run for state schools superintendent) and the other board Republicans to create as much trouble as possible for the Democratic majority over the next four years.

            “Not only did the Democrats win, but a philosophy won, a moral position won,” Rev. Barber said. The civil rights leader attributed the five-seat Democratic sweep on October 11^th and November 8^th to “fusion politics,” bringing blacks, whites, Democrats and Republicans together in coalition to being about needed change. The kind of fusion politics that North Carolina historically experienced in the late 1800’s in North Carolina between former slaves known as “Freedmen,” poor white farmers and Republicans.

            “What we saw here was in 2009, a radical, regressive, well-funded…we now know that all the way from the Tea Party; the Koch Brothers; Art Pope, who was said in an email was the architect of this plan to takeover public education, as a test case to see if a community would go backwards,” Barber said, adding that if it had worked in Wake County, the same effort would have spread across the country.

            The fusion victory,” Rev. Barber said, was a rejection of “this backwards mentality, this regression, this creating public policy that fosters resegregation and undermines the opportunity for high-quality, constitutional, well-funded, diverse public education.”

            “It is quite a moment that we must study and lift up.”

                                                        -30-

Annual Benefit to Support Throat Cancer Treatment

        The Third Annual Bobby F. Garrett Throat Cancer Benefit will be held on Saturday December 3, 2011 at Saint Matthew AME Church at 3:00 PM.  The benefit is an effort to raise awareness about the disease and to raise funds for research and ultimately prevention.

        Throat cancer is a “silent killer” that is spreading rapidly in the African American Community. Until recent years there was little known or said about throat cancer Fifty years ago, throat cancer was five times more common in men than in women, today it is only twice as common.  About 70% of those with throat cancer are detected at a late stage, therefore reducing the chances of survival.  The life span of throat cancer patients is approximately five years after the initial diagnosis.  It should also be note that cancers in the throat and mouth area, if arrested with treatment, have a high likelihood of recurring and aggressively spreading to other areas of the body.  Symptoms of throat cancer include, but are not limited to a lingering sore throat, hoarseness, temporary loss of voice, swelling in the throat area, and continuous acid reflux.  Treatment of the cancer is often two or three fold.  It can be radiation, chemotherapy, surgery, removal of the vocal chords, and or a tracheotomy which creates a means of breathing through the neck.

     When asked about the founding of the benefit by herself and her daughter, Dr. Alice Garrett stated, “after the care giving for eleven years of her husband and benefiting from the love and support of so many people during such a difficult time, we had to do something to give back, to help arrest this disease, and to help other families who might experience the same or similar trauma.  She further stated, “Esophagus Cancer is the least funded cancer of all known cancers in the United States.   In our communities we often give to benefits and participate in groups but rarely do we step out and start something that can be identified with us as a people.  Our giving is most often couched under the umbrella of well established organizations and benefits.”  Even so, the most important thing is that we give to help any cause that will save lives.  We never know the devastation and the need until it touches our lives.”  The benefit is the first known effort to raise awareness and funds for throat cancer.

     All proceeds from the benefit go to the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina who has partnered with the Garrett family.  To assist in the benefit efforts you may send tax deductible donation to Garrett Benefit, 1607 East Martin St. Raleigh, NC 27610. Please write Garrett Benefit on the memo line.  Online donations are accepted at http;//garrettconcert.kintera.org

      (Esophageal is used interchangeably in this article because once the cancer is found in any area of the neck and throat.  If the cancer recurs, it spreads throughout all areas.)

DID WAKE CONSERVATIVES ALWAYS "CARE" ABOUT BLACK CHILDREN IN WAKE COUNTY SCHOOLS?

       On December 6th, 2011, a new Democratic majority will take back over the once Republican-dominated Wake County Board of Education. 
        In October and November of 2011, Wake County voters, having stomached two years of the Republican board's political shenanigans, agenda and propaganda, decided enough was enough, and voted five of five Democrats to the board.


       One of the tricks, misconceptions and downright blatant lies that the board Republicans, led by now outgoing Chairman Ron Margiotta, and soon to be ex-Vice Chairman John Tedesco, consistant played was the myth that Black students "never" did well in Wake Public Schools, that the schools system never did anything for them, and that all busing for socioeconomic diversity was all about was to "hide" failing black students so that no one would see just how much the school system was failing them.


        Tedesco even accused past Wake School Boards of "institutional racism."


       Of course, those were just some of the  lies that the 2009 Republicans propagated in order to sweep the 2009 school board elections that year. "Failing Black students being deliberately hidden" was one of many lies used to kill Wake's diversity policy, and bring about neighborhood schools.


     But three years earlier, neighborhood schools proponents were saying no such thing. For all of the reasons why they wanted Wake's busing for diversity (which, by the way, was only 4% of all busing in the school system) to stop, failing black students was not one of them. NEVER mentioned, primarily because from 2000-2005, 81% of black students grades 3-8 were at or above grade level in Wake County, a stat well known at the time.


    In other words, for five straight years prior, black and Hispanic students were doing very well, thank you, in Wake County Public Schools.


     So opponents of Wake's diversity policy never brought it up,  because it wasn't happening, and Wake had been busing for diversity for three decades (economic diversity since 2000).
    
     All they could say was how unfair the busing was ...period!


     Case in point (and as I find more, I'll put them on), this segment from the old NBC-17 News "At Issue" show with hostess Verna Collins, Donna Martinez of the John Locke Foundation, and yours truly (dashing in black if I do say so myself).


     It's dated December 31st, 2006. See what's different about the "neighborhood schools" argument then, versus now. Seg runs about 9 minutes.


     Watch the video and see what I mean:

WALNUT CREEK CAPPED, BUT PROBLEMS PERSIST

By Cash Michaels

Editor

After a growing uproar from the Southeast Raleigh community, the Wake County School Board Tuesday unanimously capped enrollment at Walnut Creek Elementary School (WCES) at 862 students, effective this week.

        But WCPSS officials still haven’t adequately explained why they allowed what Growth and Management Supervisor Laura Evans admitted was “a huge amount of growth” for the fledgling high needs/high poverty school, created by the Republican-led board’s neighborhood schools policy, to occur. 

        Originally constructed earlier this year for a student capacity of 780, the $25 million state-of-the-art facility, on traditional calendar, has now officially enrolled an estimated 929 students as of Nov. 16th, WCPSS says, putting it at 149 pupils over capacity. 

        All 929 students will remain at WCES for the balance of the school year - none will be moved, no more will be enrolled. Officials say the new 862 capacity cap will be reached through attrition, and limiting kindergarten enrollment in 2012.

        Any new applicants to WCES will now be diverted to Creech Road Elementary School in Garner, which is on a similar calendar as Walnut Creek, school officials said.

       Before the unanimous vote, Wake School Board Vice Chairman John Tedesco tried to lay the blame for the overcrowding on District 4 representative Keith Sutton without calling his name, saying that if Sutton, in whose district WCES resides, hadn’t convinced the board to change the school’s calendar from year-round to traditional, the capacity issue never would have occurred.

      Year-round schools are able to handle larger total capacities because groups of students are tracked in on staggered schedules throughout the entire year, as opposed to just August to June for traditional calendar schools.  

        In WCES’ case, the issue wasn’t calendar, however, but ineffective management of student enrollment.

Tedesco urged the board to reconsider making WCES year-round eventually, and also called for more schools to be built in Southeast Raleigh in the future.

        While the issue of capping WCES’ high enrollment may have been settled, the damage it has left behind remains to be adequately addressed.

         Veteran educators, like Marvin Pittman, retired administrator with the NC Dept. of Public Instruction, worried that even with new cap, the overcrowding is creating conditions at WCES that interfere with the delicate process of learning.

         “My biggest concern, as an educator, is the number of children at the school,” Pittman told The Carolinian last week. “The school did not open up with the anticipation of [929] students.”

         “The staff was hired with the anticipation that they would have small class sizes, and that the school would be small - about 780 students. That’s manageable,” said Pittman, whose church, Compassionate Tabernacle of Missionary Baptist Church in Southeast Raleigh has been vigorously supporting WCES even before it officially opened. “When you put into an elementary school [929] students, you’re asking for trouble.”

         At Tuesday’s school board meeting, Pittman told members flatly, “Overcrowding is going to be a problem.”

         Under growing outrage from Pittman and other Southeast Raleigh community leaders, Wake Supt. Anthony Tata finally acknowledged last week that he and his staff allowed population at WCES to get out of hand.

        “We believe that we are on the right track,” Tata told reporters during his weekly press conference last Friday. “[But} we believe that we need to take action now to stay on the right track, and stabilize the enrollment at that school because…the challenges of having too many children could…could potentially go beyond where we want to be.”

          But why has it taken so long for Tata to “…believe that we need to take action now”? The fact that WCES has a capacity problem has been evident since it opened in August.

         Most schools try to open at approximately 95 percent capacity for the expressed purpose of allowing for transfers and more admissions.

         The Republican-led Wake School Board, however, reassigned exactly 780 students to WCES, its initial official capacity, from several other schools - primarily Barwell and East Garner elementary year-round schools - last February before construction was even finished. From the 781st student on, WCES was immediately over capacity, with apparently no controls in place to consistently manage the situation.

          When classes officially began at WCES on August 25, 763 students - 17 short of capacity - were enrolled.

         According to the WCPSS 2011-2012 Facilities Utilization Report, released just last week, on Sept. 22nd, 20 days after the 2011-2012 school year officially began, WCES logged in 891 students, 111 pupils above capacity.   

         From August 25 to Sept. 22 alone, WCES was allowed to enroll 128 pupils.

        In fact, according to WCPSS records, WCES was forced to accept students every week since the school opened. WCPSS continued to allow any child, whose parent or guardian brought an affidavit proving neighborhood residency per board policy, to be enrolled in WCES.

       Indeed, sources say, children were still being enrolled as recently as last week. 

       Most of the WCES population swell was happening in kindergarten, first and second grades, Supt. Tata said, adding, “[They] got bigger than what we anticipated and what we intended.”

       “I think we’re OK if we can get K, 1 and 2 back to where they need to be,” Tata said.

       The situation is forcing school officials to find space on WCES ‘ campus for four modular units that won’t be ready until next summer, and has called into question their promise of smaller class sizes.

        The capacity problem has now had an unintended rippling effect on other conditions at the school.

       “The answer is not more mobile units, or hiring more teachers and putting them in the building,” Marvin Pittman, who also served as a Wake principal for many years, said.

       Tata told reporters last Friday that WCES had 66 teachers, but sources say the school actually has 64 teachers, 29 of which have experience 0 - 4 years; 17 with 5-10 years in the classroom; and 18 with over 10 years of teaching.

        At Tuesday’s board work session, WCES Principal Corey Moore said of the actual regular homeroom teachers, 12 were first year.

        Experience levels are key when it comes to effectively teaching high needs children.

        A second assistant principal, more teachers and more teacher assistants are also being hired to get class sizes down to recommended levels, Tata said.

But Pittman says those changes don’t really matter as long as the school remains over-capacity. A larger student population means larger class sizes, and that means teachers not being able to successfully employ the strategies necessary to reach each and every child in that class, because there are too many.

“You’re going to need time…when you have a bunch of students, the teacher is not going to have the time,” Pittman says. 

Add to that the fact that the student population is high needs/high poverty functioning on a Level 1 or Level 2 low proficiency, and the challenge is compounded, Pittman says, especially for first or second-year educators on the WCES teaching staff, the ones most prone to burn out in high poverty schools.

“If you go to that school, you’re going to find the teachers worn out, because they are trying so hard,” Pittman says, adding that they need the support of the community and WCPSS Central Office.

The teachers at WCES also need for more money.

Because WCES isn’t a Renaissance school, its teachers aren’t being paid extra for the required 45-minute longer school days they have to put in. 

Supt. Tata says his staff is “working on that,” hoping to have WCES qualify as the system’s fifth high needs/high poverty, low performing Renaissance school receiving federal dollars to compensate teachers.

With 72 percent of its student population free-and-reduced lunch (F&R) - placing WCES among WCPSS’ top ten F&R high poverty schools - and an estimated over 50 percent classified as low achievers, parents, community leaders, and even school board members are concerned that the situation at Walnut Creek, almost midway through its first school year, is getting worse before much is being done to make it better.

         Attempting to spin an emerging crisis into some semblance of success, without explaining an apparent failure in managing WCES’ growth, Supt. Tata told reporters Friday, “We wanted to make it a high demand school, and we did,” adding that that was the reason for the over-capacity.

         The closest Tata came to explaining why he’s taken so long to deal with problem was when he said, “ Demand is higher than was anticipated.”

         Area Supt. July Mizell told board members during their work session Tuesday that the high demand “was not predictable,” even though staff had been watching it all along, trying to find space in “nontraditional places” at the school.

        Translation - the growth got way from them.

        A chief source of WCES being “beyond capacity,” according to Tata, is the legal mandate that classrooms for kindergarteners and first-graders must be located on the first floor of elementary school buildings, one of the reasons why one of two special classrooms at WCES had to be converted to deal with the overflow.

      “We’re working through some other solutions to house those students in the building,” the superintendent assured.

      Tata admitted that because of its capacity issues, WCES “quickly leapt into…” the top five over-capacity schools in the system. He insists that because WCPSS is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars, additional personnel, new technology and programs into WCES, it is “on track” to succeed.

      He added that his new school choice assignment plan “…will prevent this kind of growth from happening inside a school by managing capacity through firm controls and choice.” Enrolling only 115 kindergarteners next year will “right-size the elementary school,” Tata promised.

     “We will not have an overcrowding situation unless we choose to breach the capacity limit set,” Tata assured. 

Retired educator Marvin Pittman is also hearing from WCES parents, and they’re concerned that with almost 150 more students than originally planned for, WCES hasn’t been able to appropriately stabilize into its core mission. Additional teachers this late in the school year means students may have a different instructor in front of them in February than they had in August.

“These students need stability,” Pittman says. “They have just moved from other schools into Walnut Creek. They’re beginning to know their teachers, so now you have to disrupt them again to send them to another teacher. The parents are [concerned] about all of this transition, so just sending more trailers and more teachers is not the answer.”

At Tuesday’s school board meeting, Pittman vowed that the Southeast Raleigh community “will work with you” to make Walnut Creek a successful elementary school. He said there are many retired educators who are willing to give of their time and energy to assist however they can.

“We are a demanding community in Southeast Raleigh,” Pittman said.

To attorney Mark Dorosin, professor at the UNC School of Law’s Center for Civil Rights, what’s happening at, and to WCES, “was predictable.”

       “We saw this happening when the school board started reassigning students over the last few years,” Prof. Dorosin, who helped research and draw up the NCNAACP’s federal racial bias complaint against the Wake School Board with the US Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, told the Power 750 WAUG-AM program, “Make It Happen,” last Thursday. 

        “[The Wake School Board] created a brand new school that was racially-isolated, high poverty, and low-performing school,” Dorosin continued, noting that the Wake School Board never denied that, but to placate its critics, announced that it would compensate for it with more resources.

         “And what we know is that that is an untenable model,” Dorosin said, adding that when it comes to what the new school choice plan offers, “Walnut Creek is the canary in the coal mine. The worst case scenario which we envisioned has come into fruition.”

         Tuesday also marked the last Wake School Board meeting for Chairman Ron Margiotta - who lost his election after eight years -  and board members Dr. Carolyn Morrison and Dr. Anne McLaurin, who are leaving.

          In his final statement, Margiotta, a Republican, said even though there had been tensions on the board during his tenure, he always found his colleagues to be respectful and professional.

         He added that he was proud of his eight years on the board.

         Democrats take over the majority on the school board on Dec. 6th.

                  -30-

TATA FORCED TO ADDRESS WALNUT CREEK CAPACITY PROBLEM

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD  THE "MAKE IT HAPPEN" PODCAST OF THIS STORY NOW!

                                                          SUPT. TATA
By Cash Michaels

Editor

                 EDITOR'S NOTE - On Tuesday, November 22 prior to that evening's Wake School Board meeting to discuss capping the overcrowding at Walnut Creek Elementary school, the WCPSS released this document recommending options for the Board to consider.
                                   __________________
              Just three months after it officially opened its doors to students, Walnut Creek Elementary School (WCES) in Southeast Raleigh, which is predominately African-American, is already struggling to deal with its high needs/high poverty status, just as many in the community feared.

Originally constructed for a student capacity of 780, the $25 million state-of-the-art facility, on traditional calendar, has now enrolled an estimated 936 students as of Nov. 15^th, WCPSS confirmed, putting it at 156 pupils, or 20 percent over capacity.

                              WALNUT CREEK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

The situation has many veteran educators, like Marvin Pittman, retired administrator with the NC Dept. of Public Instruction, worried that the overcrowding is creating conditions at WCES that interfere with the delicate process of learning.

“My biggest concern, as an educator, is the number of children at the school,” Pittman told The Carolinian last week. “The school did not open up with the anticipation of 936 students.”

“The staff was hired with the anticipation that they would have small class sizes, and that the school would be small - about 780 students. That’s manageable,” said Pittman, whose church, Compassionate Tabernacle of Missionary Baptist Church in Southeast Raleigh has been vigorously supporting WCES even before it officially opened. “When you put into an elementary school 936 students, you’re asking for trouble.”

Under growing outrage from Pittman and other Southeast Raleigh community leaders, Wake Supt. Anthony Tata finally acknowledged that he and his staff allowed population at WCES to get out of hand.

“We believe that we are on the right track,” Tata told reporters during his weekly press conference Friday. “[But} we believe that we need to take action now to stay on the right track, and stabilize the enrollment at that school because…the challenges of having too many children could…could potentially go beyond where we want to be.”

But why has it taken so long for Tata to “…believe that we need to take action now”? The fact that WCES has a capacity problem has been evident since it opened in August.

Most schools try to open at approximately 95 percent capacity for the expressed purpose of allowing for transfers and more admissions.

The Republican-led Wake School Board, however, reassigned exactly 780 students to WCES, its total capacity, from several other schools - primarily Barwell and East Garner elementary year-round schools - last February before construction was even finished. From the 781^st student on, WCES was immediately over capacity, with apparently no controls in place to consistently manage the situation.
         On the first day of school August 25th, system officials say, WCES opened with 763 students, 17 short of capacity. But that quickly changed.

According to the WCPSS 2011-2012 Facilities Utilization Report, released just last week, on Sept. 22^nd, 20 days after the 2011-2012 school year officially began, WCES logged in 891 students, 111 pupils above capacity.
         In just 20 days, WCES had garnered 128 more students, a startling number.

On Oct. 4^th - seven days before the school board elections and less than two months in - citizens were already coming to the Wake School Board meeting, complaining during public comments about WCES’ student population exploding to 902, 122 past capacity.

However, WCPSS continued to allow any child, whose parent or guardian brought an affidavit proving neighborhood residency per board policy, to be enrolled in WCES.

Indeed, sources say, children were still being enrolled as recently as last week.

Most of the WCES population swell is happening in kindergarten, first and second grades, Supt. Tata says, adding, “[They] got bigger than what we anticipated and what we intended.”

“I think we’re OK if we can get K, 1 and 2 back to where they need to be,” Tata said.

The situation is forcing school officials to find space on WCES ‘ campus for two modular units that won’t be ready until next summer, and has called into question their promise of smaller class sizes.

The capacity problem has now had an unintended rippling effect on other conditions at the school.

“The answer is not more mobile units, or hiring more teachers and putting them in the building,” Marvin Pittman, who also served as a Wake principal for many years, said.

            At least 18 of WCES’ 66 teachers, according to Supt. Tata on Friday, are first-and-second year instructors, with the rest having anywhere from 3 to over 5 years of classroom experience. Experience levels are key when it comes to effectively teachng high needs children.
           _____________________________________________
         
             EDITOR'S NOTE - On Monday, a source at WCPSS said the actual number of teachers at Walnut Creek Elementary School is 64, and broke it down as 29 having 0-4 years experience; 17 having 5-10 years; and 18 having 10 or more years. Specialists are included in these numbers.
           ______________________________________________

A second assistant principal, more teachers and more teacher assistants are also having to be hired to get class sizes down to recommended levels, Tata said.

            But Pittman says those changes don’t really matter as long as the school remains over-capacity. A larger student population means larger class sizes, and that means teachers not being able to successfully employ the strategies necessary to reach each and every child in that class, because there are too many.

            “You’re going to need time…when you have a bunch of students, the teacher is not going to have the time,” Pittman says.

            Add to that the fact that the student population is high needs/high poverty functioning on a Level 1 or Level 2 low proficiency, and the challenge is compounded, Pittman says, especially for the almost one-third of the WCES teaching staff that is either first or second-year educators, the ones most prone to burn out in high poverty schools.

            “If you go to that school, you’re going to find the teachers worn out, because they are trying so hard,” Pittman says, adding that they need the support of the community and WCPSS Central Office.

            The teachers at WCES also need for more money.

            Because WCES isn’t a Renaissance school, its teachers aren’t being paid extra for the required 45-minute longer school days they have to put in.

            Supt. Tata says his staff is “working on that,” hoping to have WCES qualify as the system’s fifth high needs/high poverty, low performing Renaissance school receiving federal dollars to compensate teachers.

            With 72 percent of its student population free-and-reduced lunch (F&R) - placing WCES among WCPSS’ top ten F&R high poverty schools - and an estimated over 50 percent classified as low achievers, parents, community leaders, and even school board members are concerned that the situation at Walnut Creek, almost midway through its first school year, is getting worse before much is being done to make it better.

                                                    HILL

“Apparently we had [the] “unintended outcomes” that I keep warning about,” District 3 Wake School Board member Kevin Hill, told The Carolinian, after he met with Tata last Monday.

Hill has been warning since the Republican-led Wake School Board majority adopted its community-based neighborhood schools policy last year that if the board created high needs/high poverty schools as a result, it had to commit the required staffing and resources necessary to make them manageable.

Allowing student capacity to balloon so quickly, Hill says, defeats that purpose, and calls the new school choice assignment plan into question.

District 4 school board representative Keith Sutton, in whose district WCES resides, says he’s “extremely disturbed” by what he’s hearing, wonders why certain things he was promised by the WCPSS Central Office, like an enrollment cutoff much sooner, hasn’t happened.

“I was told that they would not [enroll any more weeks ago],” Sutton told The Carolinian. ”Somebody should have been on that.”

Indeed, WCPSS Growth and Management is supposed to monitor capacity versus enrollment, and keep the board updated when a problem is emerging.

That didn’t happen in WCES’s case. Some are wondering how could Growth and Management miss the WCES situation for so long.

Others ask if, at the urging of some Republican board members, the staff oversight was deliberate.

                                  SUTTON WITH TATA

Sutton has had the WCES’ capacity capping issue placed on the school board’s agenda for Tuesday. Supt. Tata said he will present the board with “a menu of schools” from which to choose from to send future students living in nodes around WCES.

There are indications that some of the Republican board members may recommend WCES convert to year-round to better handle capacity.

That’s what they and Chairman Margiotta originally wanted in order to keep as many Southeast Raleigh children as possible in Southeast Raleigh.

Tata insisted, though no one had asked or suggested otherwise, that WCES was not “the most overcrowded school” in the system, but was “the most heavily resourced school.”

Even with Tata - under growing pressure from WCES parents, board members Sutton and Hill, Southeast Raleigh community leaders and The Carolinian Newspaper - addressing the issue during his Friday press conference, the question remains unanswered: Why did the superintendent and his Growth and Management staff allow WCES’ student population to balloon 20 percent above capacity, and wait until now to deal with it, having to involve the school board in what should have been a management function of monitoring the situation?

                              PRINCIPAL COREY A. MOORE

 The fault, many observers say, is not with WCES’ dedicated principal, Corey A. Moore, or his committed handpicked staff and teachers who tackle the unique challenges a school with a high needs student population can bring. And it’s certainly not with the parents, or their children, who wanted to attend the brand new elementary school in the neighborhood, assured of smaller class sizes, experienced teachers and the latest technology.

The blame, many community leaders say, lies with the Republican-led Wake School Board, which reassigned thousands of children last February per its neighborhood schools policy, sometimes spinning the inevitability of creating high needs/high poverty schools; and the school system’s administration, both of whom have allowed WCES to take on more than it was designed to handle.

                                      TEDESCO

“If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high poverty, the public would see the challenges, the need to make it successful,” District 2 board member John Tedesco, a Republican, told The Washington Post last January, justifying the by-product of the neighborhood schools policy he backed.

Originally, the board’s Republican-majority wanted WCES to be a year-round school, which would have broken up the school’s capacity over a series of staggered tracks. But because Southeast Raleigh parents did not like the year-round schedule, or the added childcare costs associated with it - having at least two other year-round school in and/or near Southeast Raleigh already, District 4 representative Keith Sutton pushed for a traditional calendar instead.

Attempting to spin an emerging crisis into some semblance of success, without explaining an apparent failure in managing WCES’ growth, Supt. Tata told reporters Friday“We wanted to make it a high demand school, and we did,” adding that that was the reason for the over-capacity.

The closest Tata came to explaining why he’s taken so long to deal with problem was when he said, “ Demand is higher than was anticipated.”

Translation - they didn’t manage it.

A chief source of WCES being “beyond capacity,” according to Tata, is the legal mandate that classrooms for kindergarteners and first-graders must be located on the first floor of elementary school buildings, one of the reasons why one of two special classrooms at WCES had to be converted to deal with the overflow.

“We’re working through some other solutions to house those students in the building,” the superintendent assured.

Tata admitted that because of its capacity issues, WCES “quickly leapt into…” the top five over-capacity schools in the system. He insists that because WCPSS is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars, additional personnel, new technology and programs into WCES, it is “on track” to succeed.

He added that his new school choice assignment plan “…will prevent this kind of growth from happening inside a school by managing capacity through firm controls and choice.” Enrolling only 115 kindergarteners next year will “right-size the elementary school,” Tata promised.

“We will not have an overcrowding situation unless we choose to breach the capacity limit set,” Tata assured, seemingly insinuating that he “chose” to have exactly that happen at WCES, because of “high demand.”

Critics counter that Tata wouldn’t be running back to the school board, at board member Keith Sutton’s insistence, with an emergency request to cap the over-capacity school if he wasn’t made to realize how “off track” not properly managing WCES’ population had quickly become.

Ironically, one of the schools that is benefiting from WCES’ capacity problem is East Garner Elementary School, a year-round school from where over 220 Southeast Raleigh students were reassigned last February by the Wake School Board, to WCES.

            East Garner Elementary is in District 2, represented by board Vice Chair John Tedesco, a Republican who won election in 2009 by campaigning to get SE Raleigh kids out of Garner schools through neighborhood schools. Tedesco’s ally was Garner Mayor Ronnie Williams, who has fought, and even threatened to sue previous Wake School Boards, for assigning too many poor SE Raleigh children to Garner schools.
            When it came time last February for the board to reassign children to help fill up WCES, which was opening in August, more Southeast Raleigh children were taken from East Garner Elementary than any other.

            Today, while WCES bursts at the seams with 936 students, East Garner Elementary, which is 69 percent F&R, is home to just 577, according to the WCPSS.

            The official capacity of the school is 849.

            East Garner Elementary could literally absorb WCES’ 156 over capacity, and still have space open for 149 more students.

            That won’t happen. The 936 students at WCES are there to stay for the remainder of the school year, so all the school board will consider on Tuesday is where else to send any other neighborhood applicants, or make WCES year-round.

                                                WRIGHT

“We have done [WCES] students a disservice,” Calla Wright, president of the Coalition of Concerned Citizens for African-American Children says. “I’m deeply concerned that we’ve put our most vulnerable children at risk.”

Wright says she has heard from parents who enrolled their children in WCES because of the promise of smaller class sizes and experienced teachers. Now they are concerned that the school system is reneging on that promise.

            “Who is accountable?” Wright asked. “That is the question.”

            Retired educator Marvin Pittman is also hearing from WCES parents, and they’re concerned that with 20 percent more students than originally planned for, WCES hasn’t been able to appropriately stabilize into its core mission. Additional teachers this late in the school year means students may have a different instructor in front of them in February than they had in August.

            “These students need stability,” Pittman says. “They have just moved from other schools into Walnut Creek. They’re beginning to know their teachers, so now you have to disrupt them again to send them to another teacher. The parents are [concerned] about all of this transition, so just sending more trailers and more teachers is not the answer.”

            To attorney Mark Dorosin, professor at the UNC School of Law’s Center for Civil Rights, what’s happening at, and to WCES, “was predictable.”

“We saw this happening when the school board started reassigning students over the last few years,” Prof. Dorosin, who helped research and draw up the NCNAACP’s federal racial bias complaint against the Wake School Board with the US Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, told the Power 750 WAUG-AM program, “Make It Happen,” last Thursday.

“[The Wake School Board] created a brand new school that was racially-isolated, high poverty, and low-performing school,” Dorosin continued, noting that the Wake School Board never denied that, but to placate its critics, announced that it would compensate for it with more resources.

“And what we know is that that is an untenable model,” Dorosin said, adding that when it comes to what the new school choice plan offers, “Walnut Creek is the canary in the coal mine. The worst case scenario which we envisioned has come into fruition.”

Retired educator Marvin Pittman says he has sent communication to Supt. Tata, telling him that he wants Tata, Keith Sutton and other school board members to meet with the community to get an understanding as to the way forward for WCES. With 936 students, the school, its staff and student are going to need greater support from all quarters than ever before, and Pittman wants to ensure that they get it.

“I want us to sit down and talk about this in a real sense,” Pittman says. “This can’t continue to happen.”

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