Feb. 8--North Carolina's two largest school systems have taken vastly different approaches to two thorny issues -- student reassignment and educating low-income students with hefty academic deficiencies.

Wake County, the state's largest district, has used buses instead of greenbacks to address the academic needs of low-income students.

To meet the demands of growth and support a diversity policy aimed at reducing the number of high-poverty schools, Wake's system moves thousands of students each year to different schools, sometimes sending kids on bus rides of more than 20 miles.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the second-largest district in North Carolina, has shifted to a system of largely neighborhood schools, resulting in a stratified mix of affluent schools in the suburbs and high-poverty schools near downtown Charlotte.

Instead of busing kids to balance out the level of low-income students at each school, the district pours millions of dollars into these high-poverty schools each year to boost the performance of academically disadvantaged students.

Despite some community complaints, school leaders in each district say they're not contemplating a change. But in Wake County, which adopted a plan last week to reassign 24,654 students over the next three years, there's a push from upset parents to adopt an approach similar to Charlotte's.

"Charlotte is not proving to be a good system," said Rosa Gill, chairwoman of the Wake school board. "They're still having problems. They're going back to a segregated school system. The citizens of Wake County aren't looking for that."

Molly Griffin, chairwoman of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board, said the district is doing a pretty good job considering it has so many low-income students. Just over half of Charlotte's students receive federally subsidized lunches, compared with 28 percent in Wake.

"Our academic results are just as good as [Wake's]," Griffin said. "I'll fight you on that."

Despite the different approaches, the academic results among minority and at-risk students are very similar in both districts, with only a narrow gap in test scores. But Charlotte also has many more low-performing schools than Wake and has a harder time recruiting teachers to work in these tough schools.

Through the 1990s, both Wake and Charlotte-Mecklenburg based students' assignments on race to try to keep schools integrated. Wake did it by choice; Charlotte was following a federal court order.

But as federal courts raised more and more questions in the 1990s about race-based school assignments, Wake switched in 1999 to student assignments based on family income. The policy was based on research showing that academic performance drops when a school has too many low-income students.

Busing order ended

Charlotte continued with race-based student assignments until a lawsuit by parents resulted in a 2001 court ruling ending the busing order.

Rather than adopt Wake's approach of using family income, in 2002 Charlotte began to let students attend schools close to where they live.

That approach is similar to what Wake parents advocated at a meeting Thursday. Angry about the latest reassignment plan, the parents gathered to plan how to elect school board candidates who would give top priority to sending students to schools in their community.

These parents say Wake's diversity policy isn't working. They say they'd rather provide more money instead to high-poverty schools.