North Carolina County Wants to Give Parents a Better Option Than Busing

Anissa Borchardt / April 28, 2011

For years, Wake County, North Carolina, has had a “busing” policy aiming to create socioeconomic diversity in county schools. The district’s experiment to better integrate schools left many students having to take long bus rides to schools far from their homes. “Parents and residents … said busing for the purpose of economic diversity poses an unfair burden on families, in terms of costs to the district and in time that children could spend on learning rather than being transported,” according to an account in the Christian Science Monitor.

The current school board wants to bring the busing days to an end, with an eye toward policies that will better integrate schools while empowering parents and meeting the needs of all students.

The board voted in 2010 to rescind the busing policy and set a 15-month deadline for replacing it with a new policy. (more…)