Disparity at issue in schools
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on December 8, 2016 10:00 AM
Wayne County Public Schools is moving forward with a new application process in the lottery system used to select students at Wayne School of Engineering and Wayne Early/Middle College High School.
The method whereby students are chosen to attend the district's two newest schools has been discussed at school board and committee meetings over the past few months, as officials took a closer look at the schools' makeup.
One of the concerns was the racial demographics. When the application was approved nearly 10 years ago for the innovative high schools, the agreement called for the student body to reflect that of the county, while maintaining 80 percent first-generation college-bound students.
The 2007 demographics did that, but over the years there have been some shifts.
In 2015, WEMCH's population was 24 percent black, compared to 36 percent in the county; 35 percent white versus 40 percent in the county; and 29 percent Hispanic, compared to 21 percent in the county. Wayne School of Engineering's numbers that year were 15 percent black, 68 percent white and 3 percent Hispanic.
Tamara Ishee, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction hired in 2015, said the lottery system itself was not in question.
"Anyone can apply," she said. "We've always done that. We don't want to discourage anyone. That was partly why we took a look (at the system) to make sure no one was discouraged.
"We want to make it as unbiased as possible, as open to as many candidates as possible. The lottery that we've run has always been fair, has always followed procedure. You can't fault what was being done."
The process for potential students includes an application, as well as a teacher recommendation and essay. The only disqualifiers are that a student cannot be more than two years below grade level or have any significant disciplinary or attendance issues.
It is a "blind lottery," with no identifiable information, including race, included. Names of all students are literally put in a box and drawn out. The individual application on file is then checked to make sure all the required materials are in place, before being officially accepted.
In an effort to remedy some of the disparity, the district has enlisted the help of an outside agency to handle the lottery moving forward. SERVE, a research organization affiliated with UNC-Greensboro, provides a similar free service to many early colleges around the state, Ms. Ishee said.
The new procedure calls for applications to be submitted to the central office, where a committee reviews them to make sure all paperwork is complete and the student is qualified for the lottery. One of the requirements is that 80 percent of the students be what is called first-generation college students.
Another way to ensure countywide representation, Ms. Ishee said, is to focus on the feeder patterns of the schools in the recruitment effort.
"For example, say Aycock has 20 percent of our high schools in the district. Then the percentage of students at the early college that would have gone to Aycock will be 20 percent," she explained. "We'll do that for all the feeder high schools and then for Wayne School of Engineering, where they take them in as sixth-graders, we'll be doing the same thing for the percentage from middle schools."
Some of the recent discussion regarding the existing application process and lottery system was prompted by requests from the NAACP and the UNC Center Officer of Civil Rights for data about the two schools.
Ms. Ishee said the district complied with the requests, then conducted its own discussion about the data. While "broad in (the) complaints," she said she believed the information provided was satisfactory.
Keith Copeland, education chairman for the NAACP, spoke at Monday night's school board meeting, thanking Ms. Ishee for the "transparency" about the disparity in racial numbers. He still, however, had questions about how to remedy the situation.
"Was it that they're not getting enough applicants or was it some other reason?" he asked. "From what I read, it seemed like all of the (applications) went into one hat.
"But if you're really trying to get a certain amount from each population, why don't you have more than one hat? Then that way, just take up a percentage from each one of those hats to make up what you want to represent, which is community representation."
Ms. Ishee told the News-Argus on Tuesday that efforts are being made to remove any "accidental or implied bias" in the application itself, which may have impacted who was and was not qualified to be in the lottery.
"They had many more applications than slots, which indicates a lot of students applied," she said. "I can't answer that. I also wasn't there (before). All I know is when I sat in the lottery, I saw an awful lot of kids that unfortunately weren't going to be going because there were more applicants than seats."
The district also does not have statistics on the breakdown of ethnic groups submitting applications, she said, as that was not something previously measured.
In fact, the disparities are not isolated to just a racial issue, she pointed out.
"In terms of EC (exceptional children) students, the percentage is not a good match for the district," she said. "EC students are not automatically disqualified for either one of these schools. We can serve EC students at these schools as long as they're not more than two grade levels below.
"I'm not sure what the exact percentage of EC students is across the county but we're much lower at these schools."
Taking it a step further, Ms. Ishee said there are other layers to this discussion.
"By law, we're not allowed to make selections based on race or gender so that can't figure in," she said. "All we can do is ensure wide representation from across the county and we can't stack the deck. That would sort of be a back door way of bringing race into the equation and that would be illegal.
"We can't ask about economic, free and reduced students status and use that as an indicator for who gets accepted into the schools," she said. "We know we're not matching the county demographics, either. We're sort of, our hands are tied in a lot of ways because legally we can't just say we want this percentage of this type of kid. We're not allowed to do that."
Applications, due by Feb. 24, 2017, are currently posted on the district's website, waynecountyschools.org, on the Wayne School of Engineering site.