Wake school leaders unveil second draft reassignment plan for 2022-23

Sycamore Creek is a year-round school, but it’s expected to lose around 92 students in the process of moving students around several schools to fill up Barton Pond Elementary School, opening up in northern Raleigh next year.

The second draft also:

The district will hold a public meeting on the enrollment plan proposal, with plans for the school board to vote on a final draft Dec. 7.

“This process is not done,” Glenn Carrozza, Assistant Superintendent for School Choice, Planning and Assignment, told the board Tuesday. “We still have a lot of feedback that we are reviewing and analyzing.”

Much of the feedback has concerned children who would be moved from a school under one calendar to a school that uses another calendar, like the concerns expressed by Sycamore Creek parents.

The new schools alone could cause nearly 600 students to move to another calendar. All of those students could apply to another school — not their current school — to stay on the same calendar.

A few hundred more students could be shifted to new calendars under proposals to receive overcapacity schools and fill under capacity schools. Those changes do not come with a calendar application school for students to remain on the same calendar. Students could stay at their current school by applying for a stability transfer that would last a year and would not come with bus service.

Board members also expressed concern that some schools not overcapacity would lose students and risk being underused.

“Baileywick (Elementary) is losing some families that they really need,” Board Member Roxie Cash said. “I don’t have anywhere to go to help that school.”

Baileywick Elementary could lose about 29 students next year to the new Barton Pond Elementary, under the current proposal. That would drop the school from 88% filled to 81% filled.

Cash also noted the presence of charter schools near Baileywick Elementary.

Carrozza said he understood other schools faced the same prospects of underenrollment and said the district built Barton Pond Elementary three years ago, assuming different settlement patterns in the area.

“With that said I think we need to continue to look at why parents are continuing to make the choice that they are,” Carrozza said. “Every choice we give parents is another option for them to not go where we need them to go.”

The district is “always trying to play catch up on what choice they’ll make” to fill up schools, he said.

Feedback so far from Baileywick Elementary parents is that they want to send their children to Barton Pond Elementary, he said.

Most of the student impact would come from an effort to fill new schools in growing parts of the county. Three new schools opening next fall — two elementary schools and one middle school — are expected to enroll about 2,000 students.

Reassignments into and out of about a quarter of the district’s 200 other schools would result in gains or losses of just a handful to several dozen students at most of them. Those reassignments are meant to relieve overcrowded schools and fill underused schools.

Most of the schools where enrollment would rise or fall are on the outer edges of Wake County, outside of Raleigh.

The vast majority of students, around 98%, would not be affected by the reassignment plan.