Wake School Facts
Bringing you the facts about Wake County School assignments, because the School Board sure doesn't seem to want to.
List of organizations List of WCPSS info Interesting News Articles	This site is intended to present facts and studies related to the school assignment policies of the Wake County Public School System (referred to as "WCPSS" throughout the rest of the site). On the left is a list of all the data collected on the site. If you have any data, papers, or links you would like added, please contact me at webmaster@wakeschoolfacts.org. If you would like to be notified whenever I make updates to the pages, here is my RSS Feed. A quick summary of what this is about: Wake County, North Carolina has been dealing with exploding growth over the last 15 to 20 years. This has led to it becoming one of the largest school districts in the nation, with 130,000 kids and growing. The problem is that the school board has done a very poor job of planning for this growth, and has used this growth as an excuse to implement socio-economic based diversity busing. What this means is that they take kids that are on the Free & Reduced Lunch program (often referred to as F&R) and attempt to spread them out around the county. This leads to children being bumped from their current school to make room for more F&R children, and many of these children are being bused 45 minutes or more to school every day, despite schools with room being much closer. This both forces children to get up earlier to get to school and makes it much more difficult for them to participate in extracurricular activities at school and have their parents involved in school. They have also attempted to force Mandatory Year Round schedules as a way to alleviate overcrowding. While there is much debate on the educational benefits of a year-round schedule, Wake County has implemented it in a very short-sighted manner. They have some elementary schools, a few middle schools, and no high schools. This leads to families with children on different school calendars, making it difficult to schedule vacations and other family activities, not to mention confusion among young children wondering why they have to go to school while another sibling does not. All of this has also led to regular reassignments, where every year several thousand children are assigned to new schools. You have no idea what school your child will attend next year, nor can you purchase a home based on which school it is assigned to. There is no stability in this school system. WCPSS claims this is due to overcrowding, when the reality is that the F&R diversity policy balloons these assignments to more than twice the size they need to be to relieve crowding (short-sighted school construction schedules and placement are another factor, as are year-round schools that are only at their traditional calendar capacity). Needless to say, the WCPSS presents fairly one-sided evidence in favor of their policies. This site is an attempt to collect evidence on the difficulties with their policies, and how many of them have been proven to be false hopes.