Race issue a certainty in school board run

If you haven’t been paying attention to the school-board race, maybe it’s time that you started.

That old bugaboo, the politics of race, bubbles just below the surface in the contest for seats on the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Board of Education.

Statistics, questionnaires and months-old screen grabs from social-media websites are making the rounds, and with Election Day nearing, the rhetoric likely will become more pronounced.

It started when the partisan political tags were removed from school-board races, and it came to a head when the group backing that move — Communities Helping All Neighbors Gain Empowerment, or CHANGE — asked a simple question of candidates:

Are you willing to commit to a formal public exploration of alternative school assignment plans that will increase diversity and improve student achievement in partnership with interested community groups by 2011?

That question begets others: Increased diversity or forced busing? Neighborhood schools or resegregated schools? Old-school race-baiting or new-school political correctness?

The root of the issue dates to 1995, when the school system did away with cross-town busing and started a program of neighborhood schools and parental choice.

Resentment about the re-segregation of schools started to slowly build — nowhere near the bad, old “separate-but-equal” days but noticeable nonetheless.

The student populations at high schools built since then — Reagan and Atkins — skewed heavily one way or other. This year, Reagan is 77.7 percent white, 12.3 percent black and 3.8 percent Hispanic. The three schools that Atkins comprises are 67.9 percent black, 24.4 percent Hispanic and 5 percent white (the numbers don’t add up to exactly 100 percent because of other small groups).

Fast-forward to the present day and the coming election. Further proof of tension can be found in discussions about the Walkertown High School, scheduled to open in 2011.

According to numbers compiled by the student-assignment office, the residential area for the new Walkertown High will be 68.2 percent white, 18.5 percent black and 8.2 percent Hispanic.

A lot of Walkertown’s students will come from Carver High, whose racial composition would shift dramatically: Currently, Carver’s student population is 49.5 percent black, 34 percent white and 12.4 percent Hispanic. Next year, it would go to 74.6 percent black, 13.9 percent Hispanic and 8.7 percent white.

The numbers at Walkertown and Carver don’t take into account kids who transfer in from other areas, but you can see the trend.

An image of a Facebook posting from April that shows a comment about Walkertown from school-board incumbent Jeannie Metcalf, running for an at-large seat, illustrates the point.

“Great meeting ... we need to let the folks know if 2 conservative incumbents loose (sic), that school won’t be ‘their’ high school after waiting all these years to get it.”

“Their” high school?

Metcalf said yesterday that her intent isn’t to inject race into the race. She said that it’s simply a matter of supporting parental choice, neighborhood schools, and responding to the question about “alternative school-assignment plans that will increase diversity.”

“One of their goals is to change our student-assignment plan,” she said. “If they change it, Walkertown and Carver won’t (become) neighborhood schools.”

The “they” Metcalf is referring to, presumably, would be school-board candidates who answered “yes” to the question posed by CHANGE about exploring alternative assignment plans.

Looked at it another way, changing assignment plans also might mean that Walkertown doesn’t open lily-white and Carver doesn’t become predominantly black. And that, to some, opens up the possibility of busing.

Like most things that involve race, the answers to questions about achieving diversity are complicated. I don’t have them and don’t pretend to.

I do know this: Whether or not we admit it, whether or not we like it, the school-board election — and any discussion of changing school-assignment plans — will have a racial component. The numbers on that score don’t lie.

Would you rather have your kid travel clear across town on a bus ride that could take more than an hour in order to achieve diversity, or learn in classrooms dominated by one particular race?

Raleigh and Wake County are neck-deep in a similar debate that’s been raging for months. It’s coming here, too.

How we conduct ourselves will say a lot about how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.

ssexton@wsjournal.com

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