New school board may hit brake on busing
When Rosemarie Wilson moved her family to a wealthy suburb of Raleigh a couple of years ago, the biggest attraction was the prestige of...
The New York Times
RALEIGH, N.C. — When Rosemarie Wilson moved her family to a wealthy suburb of Raleigh a couple of years ago, the biggest attraction was the prestige of the public schools. Then she started talking to neighbors.
Don't believe the hype, they warned. Many were considering private schools. All pointed to an unusual desegregation policy, begun in 2000, in which some children from wealthy neighborhoods were bused to schools in poorer areas, and vice versa, to create economically diverse classrooms.
"Children from the 450 houses in our subdivision were being bused all across the city," said Wilson, for whom the final affront was a proposal by the Wake County Board of Education to send her two daughters to schools 17 miles from home.
She vented her anger at the polls, helping elect four new Republican-backed education board members last fall. Now in the majority, those board members are trying to make good on campaign promises to end Wake's nationally recognized income-based busing policy.
At stake is the direction of the 140,000-student school system, the largest in America to consider family income in school placements. Wake has long been the most prominent example of a district that dropped
