April 29, 2015
Four members CMS Board of Education Wednesday set in motion the 16-month review that will look at whether to change the way North Carolina’s second-largest school district assigns children to school.
Existing rules allow small annual changes to accommodate the opening (or closing) of schools and other narrow matters. But the rules also call for a more fundamental review every six years. Changes agreed to during this review will not affect classrooms until the 2017-18 school year.
And so it began Wednesday, with assignment chief Scott McCully walking members of the board’s Policy Committee through the existing policies. After two hours, board members had had enough for one day and will pick up the task at their next meeting on Thursday, May 14 at 10:30 a.m. at the Government Center.
For parents and residents new to this subject, the videos might prove enlightening. People in the room had a combined many decades of experience with CMS assignment issues.
The first 30 minutes of the two-hour Policy Committee session was devoted to a separate school calendar policy revision. The remaining 90 minutes or so of the meeting was about student assignment.
The first video below is an edited series of excerpts. Below that are six videos that capture virtually the entire student assignment discussion.
The CMS video crew would have done a far better job of preserving and posting gavel-to-gavel coverage. Perhaps the importance of airing this discussion about student assignment in a way that the general public can listen will prompt their dispatch to the May 14 Policy Committee meeting.