[OnyxCougar]

As someone who lives a couple counties over from Wake County (I don't have a dog in that race), but as someone who pays NC taxes, I think that the argument about the tea-party is moot. I don't really care if the school board is Republican, Democrat, or Socialist. It simply doesn't matter.

What DOES matter is that Tedesco and the board want to bring back neighborhood (community) school zones. So your kids go to school with their friends in the neighborhood. Which I think is a great idea.

Historically, the desegregation laws were a good thing, and coming from a good place, namely a desire to integrate kids. I'm down with that. But it's been 60 years, and while I'm not naive enough to believe that racism is dead, I'm also of the firm belief that we should NOT be busing kids 90 minutes each way to a different middle school BASED ON RACE.

So a couple of years ago, they changed the standard from Ethnicity to "socio-economic" factors. They stated a target of no more than 40% of student on free/reduced lunch (FRL) per school. So, see now they could say that it's not RACIAL, it's ECONOMICS. Although everyone knew that the majority of the FRL kids just happened to be black.Gotta love political correctness. But that still left the problem of bussing POOR kids 90 minutes each way to school.

So Tedesco is coming at it like this: neighborhood zoning would provide a savings (currently, WFSD pays quite a few million in transportation (fuel, maintenance, driver salaries for all those 90 minute each way trips, etc).) So lets stop bussing kids and put that savings into the underperforming schools AND build the 12 new schools that we have budgeted into areas that..wait for it...need more schools.

I think it's a perfectly sound, logical way to do it.

My catholic, conservative co-worker, however, feels that "community" zoning is going BACK to the bad old days of segregation. Everyone knows that people who live in a certain area tend to be a certain ethnicity, whether that be a socio-economic reason, a cultural reason, or a racist reason. He thinks that if a 5 block square area for example, is 98% black in makeup, then they SHOULD bus kids out and "bring in" white kids, hispanic kids and asian kids to make up a more racially diverse school.

I think that's bullshit. There is a really good middle school out in my county, and I specifically moved out to that "zone" because I wanted my kid to go to that school. And he did. But if my coworker had his way, my kid would have been bussed to the shit school up county simply based on the fact that he's white. That's racism to me, pure and simple.

Let's spend our energy, focus, and money on making ALL the school in the district equally awesome, instead of spending that money on transporting a white kid 90 minutes to a "shitty school" so a black kid can spend the same 90 minutes on a bus going to a "great school". Make them all great schools.