50 years later: The impact of the Wake-Raleigh schools merger — and what’s ahead

This is the second part of a two-part series looking back on the merger of Raleigh City Schools and Wake County Schools in 1976.

2026-09-02

Fifty years removed from the merger of Raleigh City Schools and Wake County Schools, current and former education leaders are already thinking about the next 50 years.

There’s a near-universal theme: The success of the Wake County Public School System hinges on not just marketing itself as the best choice for families, but proving it, too, they say.

While Wake has had internal school choice options — namely, magnet schools — since the 1980s, the number of options outside of the system has been growing more recently.

About one-quarter of Wake County schoolchildren attend a public charter school, a private school or are homeschooled, according to the school system. A decade ago, it was about one-fifth, a difference of thousands of students. The district isn’t shrinking like most others in North Carolina and across the country, as birth rates continue to decline, but it’s not growing so much anymore. That has put financial pressure on the district to keep up with costs that rise faster than revenues.

Meanwhile, community members raise concerns about tight budgets — including how to balance teacher pay with tackling $800 million in deferred maintenance to aging schools and malfunctioning heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. 

They’ve raised concerns about the school system being too big, in terms of the number of students and administrators and the geographic size of the county. Many have raised concerns about the district’s hallmark magnet programs, which are underenrolled at some schools and not available to all families. And many remain skeptical that the district is all that integrated in the end.

The focus moving forward, says Superintendent Robert Taylor, is excellence.

Taylor tells teachers to think about where they can take the school district over the next 50 years. 

“When I talk to citizens of Wake County that attended school these past 50 years, they talk about those principals. They talk about those teachers,” Taylor said. “They talk about the celebrated programs that gave them access to students under other conditions they would have never learned anything about and went to school with those students. And so that's what we want to celebrate. That this has been a wonderful 50 years. How are we going to use that to celebrate the past, but also prepare for the future that's right in front of us?”

Merging toward integration?

The merger in 1976 of Raleigh City Schools and Wake County Schools was borne out of concerns about potential desegregation orders and a desire to more efficiently use the resources the county had to the benefit of both districts. The predominantly Black Raleigh City Schools had been losing white students to predominantly White Wake County Schools after the systems desegregated, resulting in empty seats in Raleigh and overflowing schools in Wake.

Leaders at the time believed a combined countywide school system would be better economically for both districts and keep the capital city competitive in recruiting businesses to the city.

Dudley Flood, a longtime desegregation adviser for the state, didn’t think the Wake-Raleigh merger yielded full integration.

“They haven't done it yet,” he said in an interview with WRAL News. “But you have to start somewhere. Keep in mind, the law didn't require integration. It required desegregation. Desegregation is a legal thing. We did that as well as it can be done. Integration is a social thing.”

Federal data analyzed by Census Scope suggests the Raleigh-Durham metropolitan area is more integrated than other metro areas, particularly in comparison to other southern and northern metropolitan areas where city- and suburban town-based school districts have always dominated. That includes Atlanta; Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Little Rock, Arkansas; St. Louis, Baltimore and Philadelphia, among many other cities. Few nearby metropolitan areas scored as well or better than Raleigh-Durham. The large majority were worse.

“I think the community plays a role in that,” said Bill McNeal, a longtime educator who was Wake’s superintendent from 2000 to 2006. “I think those parents who said, ‘OK, I'm going to send my child, but I’m holding you responsible.’ That is a tough thing to live up to, but you’ve got to live up to it or else the assignment doesn’t work.”

Valencia Hicks-Harris, a former teacher and the daughter of a longtime Wake teacher described the integration in Wake’s schools as partial.

“But unfortunately, I think we have integrated schools with segregated classrooms, meaning that there are still some things that are systemic that we still need to work through,” Hicks-Harris said.

Hicks-Harris is also among the many parents who have noticed discrepancies in the students who are labeled as academically and intellectually gifted. She worries about who is being left out of academic rigor.

Statewide data shows disproportionately few Black students are identified as academically or intellectually gifted — just 5%, despite comprising 24% of the state’s student population. County-level data is not readily available.

Improved diversity among teachers is essential going forward, the people WRAL interviewed said.

After integration and mergers across the country — including in Wake — many Black teachers lost their jobs. Today, the vast majority of the profession is white women. Research suggests that students learn best when taught by at least some people who look like them or are from the same culture. That also includes Black teachers, male teachers, Hispanic teachers and others. On top of that, North Carolina has a shortage of qualified teachers, in general.

“We want teachers of different backgrounds because everybody brings something to the educational table, and we want to make sure that we encourage as many people as possible to go into education,” Taylor said. Part of that, he said, is making sure people want to become teachers, that teaching is admired as a profession.

Hicks-Harris’ mother, Paulette Malone Hicks, is a Black woman. She didn’t lose her teaching job, but she noticed a demographic change that’s not unusual today.

“I would find myself being the only one looking like me in that particular space, and I'm sure a lot of the other children found themselves the only one who looked like them in that space,” Hicks said.

For the children, the impact was more on their self-esteem, she said.

“They questioned their abilities,” Hicks said. Teachers had to look deeper at every child. “It's

almost like getting to know the book instead of looking at the cover. So there were quite a few

things that we all had to adjust to, and you had to be brave.”

Rethinking magnet schools?

A major piece of Wake’s attempt to desegregate was the creation of magnet schools starting in the early 1980s. A magnet program is an academic specialty for a school, such as an arts theme or science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). They’re designed to lure in more affluent families, and seats are reserved for them, usually within a larger school.

Recently, many families located near magnet schools have been raising concerns about magnet programs being inaccessible to them. Lower-income families who live closer to the schools may not be assigned to the schools, and then they aren’t eligible to leave their base schools for the school with a magnet program.

“I tell Dr. Taylor all the time,” Hicks-Harris said, referring to the superintendent. “We need to change that algorithm because we have students who are living in inner-city neighborhoods that do not have access to magnet school programming, so that they can be exposed to different opportunities.”

A critical piece of ensuring the district’s school choice programs work is making sure the whole school feels connected, Taylor said. Students in a school’s magnet program should not feel disconnected from the students who are not, or vice versa, he said.

“The wonderful thing about a magnet program is that it allows kids from all walks of the community to be able to come together, learn together, learn from each other,” Taylor said. “That is a huge benefit for everyone.” 

McNeal recalled that when parents have a choice, principals often compete against one another for the students. He remembered a former principal at Sanderson High School who was tired of losing students to Enloe Magnet High School, so he started copying what Enloe was doing, including its curriculum, and calling it by another name.

As long as it didn’t get out of hand, McNeal was OK with that approach. He saw it as a competitive focus on academics, to the benefit of students.

“Wake County was a pioneer in using magnet schools to make these really special schools in the city that white folks in the suburbs would want to send their kids to and would feel good about it and would be getting opportunities,” said Keith Poston, executive director of WakeEd Partnership, a nonprofit that works with the business community to provide programming and supplies to schools. “That's actually still working.”

Size vs. scale

Wake is undeniably a large county, Poston said. That echoes what other educational leaders in Wake and at the state level have said — that Wake is urban, suburban and rural, all at the same time.

Beyond being North Carolina’s most populous county, Wake is also one of the biggest in the state geographically, topping 830 square miles. While Wake remains more densely populated than most, it’s nearly half as dense as its major counterpart, Mecklenburg, which has almost the same number of people in just less than 550 square miles.

“You drive from across this county from the furthest school away east or west, it's crazy. It's crazy,” Poston said. “It's a lot of space.”

Parents who are new to the area are often used to different school system setups — town and city districts instead of county districts, neighborhood schools instead of magnets or farther-away assignments.

Taylor often explains to parents why things are set up the way they are. One notable frustration they have is that some areas have too many children for the number of schools there, leading to farther-away assignments. But the district also assigns children to schools that are farther away from them in an effort to diversify schools, though it has done less of that in recent years.

“What we want to do is try to avoid high-poverty schools,” Taylor said. “All of the research

and data shows that concentrated poverty makes it extremely more difficult to educate children. But when we are able to build a school system that does not have that high concentration, there is a huge benefit for everyone. And so that's what I want them to understand, that they may be accustomed to a different configuration in a different community, but we've been specific about the design here, and it works. And we want them to be a part of that.”

Research suggests high-poverty schools can struggle to address out-of-school challenges that affect school performance.

Current and former education leaders describe community buy-in to the countywide approach as essential in a system that can feel new or big to many of its constituents.

“We couldn’t do it if the community didn’t buy in,” McNeal said.

That gets challenging as schools get bigger, and as the district has gotten bigger over the years. The bigger the population, the less people sometimes feel connected to it, McNeal said.

McNeal described always telling parents, year after year, what the district is promising and how the size of the district benefitted them. He and other leaders would point out graduation rates, ACT and SAT scores, magnet opportunities. They’d tell families with long bus rides that some families were traveling farther, using their own cars, to get their children to the same school because of its reputation.

Whenever families complain about school being canceled in southern Wake County because of snow in northern Wake County — something parents still complain about today — McNeal told them that the cancellation was a symptom of success: All of Wake County’s specialty schools mean students can travel far and wide for school, meaning the weather in another town can still matter.

Wake’s classroom performance tends to outdo the rest of North Carolina. Consistently, more students test on grade level than in other districts. In the spring of 2026, more Wake students tested on grade level than the rest of North Carolina, often by 10 or more percentage points.  

While the district has grown bigger and more complicated, it’s still better together, said Paulette Malone Hicks, a retired 50-year teacher.

“If you break it up into small districts, again, you're going back to segregation because … look at where people are living,” she said.

Diversity in neighborhoods and schools can still come with clashes, her daughter, Valencia Hicks-Harris, said. She recalled volunteering with the parent-teacher association at her son’s former school. Another parent mentioned that children who lived on a certain street were underperforming,

“I said, ‘Hold on, you’re talking about my street, and you're grouping my son based on these things that he doesn't meet, and so that lets me know that you have not taken a home visit to really to get to know the community which you're serving,’” Hicks-Harris recalled.

Moving forward amid financial headaches

While budget adjustments are relatively new to the district in recent years, the district has always had financial limitations.

“The first credit card I had and got in debt for was buying stuff for school,” Hicks recalled of her early teaching days in the 1960s and 1970s. Hicks said being innovative was difficult, but not being creative. She could repurpose home recycling goods — bottle tops, cans — into teaching materials.

Today, the resources can differ greatly school-to-school because of what parent-teacher associations can provide, Hicks-Harris said. She taught at Briar Creek, Apex and Holly Grove elementary schools, all of which had different resources from those associations, despite the district avoiding high-poverty schools. Parent involvement looks different, too, she noted.

Tighter finances and loss of students means some things fall by the wayside, McNeal said. Curb appeal is important. So are facilities and teachers. At some point, he said, budgeting can seem futile — often moving money from one need to pay off another.

The school district has noted that it’s spending more money on HVAC now than in recent years. Still, the problems, including sweltering classrooms on hot August and September days, are piling up too fast to make a dent in resolving the facility woes.

When Poston thinks about the past 50 years, he can’t help but think of the next 50 years and making sure the school system can continue to be successful.

“If you want to look at what's made Wake County so successful, why families move here, why businesses invest here, the growth that we've had here, I would certainly put the Wake County Public School System right up there, along with our universities and Research Triangle Park, as a key piece of it,” Poston said.

He recalled the other major cities he’s lived in, where corporate leaders interviewing job candidates often tell those candidates that they’ll probably want to put their children in private school.

When he started working in corporate communications in Raleigh, he realized many corporate leaders actually sent their children to public schools. Their spouses were involved in the parent-teacher associations.

“This is a public-school community,” Poston said.

Still, Poston and other leaders are wondering if the commitment of the past 50 years will live on in the next 50 years.

“Are we willing to keep that commitment?” Poston said. “Are we willing to keep investing in paying our teachers? Are we willing to keep a focus on keeping the community together?”

Public schools are still one of the few places people can go and be alongside everyone, he said.

“And I think it matters,” he said.

For that to hold, Wake has to be families’ top choice for a school, Poston said.

“If Wake County Public Schools is going to be a top choice, then Wake County Public Schools has got to deliver,” he said. “We have to have great teachers, we have to have innovative teaching, we have to have school choice within the school system.”

The magnet programs offer courses that can scarcely be found in many other parts of the state, Poston said. The opportunities of a large school system are clear, he said.

The Wake County Public School System is an evolving story, McNeal said.

“It’s like where you start building the foundation brick by brick by brick, the strength of that foundation is all of those bricks that have been put there by people who had their eye on what I call the prize and that is making certain that we have a strong school district, one that would stand the test of time,” McNeal said.