There's about a three week period of time in January where the system is open
for new applicants to the magnet school system so I thought this
was a great time to talk about the public schools in Wake County so we're
gonna talk about that we're gonna talk about the difference between magnets and
charters and traditional neighborhood schools. I'm gonna give you everything
that you need to know to understand our school system and fit into it. We're
talking about that right now so stick around.
Thanks for watching today. We are talking about the Wake County public school
system today. It is open enrollment for magnet schools in the first week of
January it starts. It goes through the end of January. I will actually post
those dates and links to it down below but this is a great time to be thinking
about if you want to make changes in the public school system. First of all 160
schools in the Wake County public school system. Why is it so big? Back when
schools were being desegregated in the 60s and 70s Wake County noticed that even
though desegregation was the law it wasn't really happening in the schools
because people were really segregated by socioeconomic status and that meant that
they were segregated many times by color. Instead of having the City of Raleigh
schools and then the Wake County Schools they decided to make it all one big
system. They implemented a magnet school program. It's one of the best in the
country. It's been a model to school systems around the country because it
really has worked to make the schools more diverse. They took neighborhood
schools that were in lower socioeconomic areas and they gave extra funding to
those schools and then each magnet school has its own theme. It
might be a Montessori magnet or a gifted and talented magnet or arts or STEM. They
have all these different themes and those themes and the extra funding that
goes along with them is designed to attract families that are in wealthier
areas to come to those schools. And so they they give a certain number of seats
that are allotted to families from wealthy areas to come into the schools
in the lower socioeconomic areas. And it's been really successful. So that's
why the system is so large. What that means is we have a lot of choice in the
Raleigh area. In Wake County, not only are there magnet schools but there also
are charter schools. A charter school is basically a school using publicly
funded dollars and the school is run more like a private school. So instead of
being governed by the school board it's governed by a board of directors that's
chosen for that school. It has a principal or headmaster
that makes all of the decisions in that school. Rather than being required to do
what the school board decides they can choose their own curriculum. They have
some flexibility with teachers so for example the teachers, I think it's only
fifty percent of the teachers, in a charter school are required to be
licensed by the state of North Carolina as a teacher. But that allows them to
have... like one of my son's best teachers in a charter school that he went to was a
scientist who was the biology teacher and he was a biologist by profession. He
decided that he wanted to get into the classroom and he just inspired my son to
really really love science. And so it allows them to do things like that or
for professionals in their field who may not have licensure but want to teach, it
allows them to pull from some some talent in that way. So there are charter
schools, there are magnet schools and then there are still neighborhood
schools. Everybody in Wake County is zoned to a particular school. Most of
those schools are on the traditional calendar but we also have year-round
calendars here. So in addition to charter schools and magnet schools we also have
year-round schools. You can be zoned to them as your main school or if
you're not zoned to a year round school you will always have a year-round option. So
if you really like the year-round you can request a year-round school.
One thing I've noticed is that when people hear year-round schools they're
first response is "that's horrible. why would my kid want to go to school
every day?" Well that's not how it works. First of all, they operate on a
year-round schedule but that doesn't mean they go to school every day. They
still have the same number of days off it's just broken up throughout the year
more evenly, rather than one huge chunk in the summer time.
Most of the year-round calendars, and I'll explain the calendars in just a
minute, most of the year-round calendars do have some time off in the summer but
there are four different tracks for year-round schools. The purpose of the
year-round schools was to use the buildings rather than the buildings
sitting open for months at a time. It was to use those resources. Basically how
it works is every track regardless of what track you're on you all follow the
same basic schedule. They'll be six weeks of school on and three weeks of
school off and then a longer, I think it's about eight weeks, in your summer.
It may or may not fall exactly in the summer. They all have times
off at the holidays usually around Christmas, some a little bit shorter than
others. But they all get some time off then. And so basically when one calendar
track is in school another calendar track is off and when they're off
another calendar track is in so that there's always somebody in seats in the
classroom. For many people they just love it. I mean I think kids do really
well that way, six weeks on three weeks off. They get some time to recoup and and
get their energy back and absorb some of that stuff they've learned and summer is
really really long so it's a shorter summer and many parents love that. By the
end of the summer everybody's just bored and cranky and you know getting on each
other's nerves because they've been around each other for so long without
any interruptions. And so people are ready to go back to school. The
year-round calendar has a shorter summer and so it's just really really nice. The
other type of school that we have is the early college schools and these are
basically schools, they are high schools, and they coordinate with some
of the local universities around here to offer two full years of college for each
student when they graduate high school. So it's kind of a dual enrollment thing.
The kids go to high school for five years and when they graduate high school
they've gotten their first on their second year of college already completed
for free. And those [schools] are on a modified year-round calendar. it's a little bit
different than the year-round and I think it's like eight weeks on two weeks
off and then like an eight or nine week summer. So that's a really good option in
the Triangle as well. The last and really important thing I
should talk about is school capping because that really affects a lot of
people. Actually it doesn't affect as many people as it feels like the way
you hear some people talk about it. About ten percent of our schools are capped in
a given year and what that means is the growth in the area it's usually in high
growth areas where there's a lot of new construction. So the growth in the area
will exceed the number of seats that they have in the school and they haven't
yet built a new school to make up for it and shifted
things around so those kids are sent to an overflow school, not the school that
is zoned to their house. Like I said it's in about 10% of the homes
and generally speaking the overflow school is just as good or better as the
school that they were zoned to. People get really nervous about that and I
understand it because ambiguity there's enough ambiguity when you're
moving into a new area. But ambiguity about where your child is gonna go to
school is not something people like to deal with. But in most cases people are
happy with how things end out. I think generally speaking we've handled all of
the incredible growth in Wake County school system incredibly well and I
think it's a great system. The Wake County school system performs better
than many many school systems across the country and it's a great place to be. People
move here for our Wake County Public Schools. So I hope that all of this
information was useful to you. I've got a blog post linked down below that has
links to all the places on the Wake County website that you'll need to
register for magnet schools and to review all the different magnet schools.
Also links for charter schools and everything that I discussed in this
video is all linked in the blog post below so make sure you check that out.
Don't forget to subscribe I post new videos every Tuesday with lots of great
information about living in the Raleigh area, whether it's recreation or home
buying or schools posts like this. So thanks for watching and I look
forward to seeing you next week!