Ask any former Raleigh or Wake County teacher where they were in the summer of 1976, when the two school districts merged, and they remember.
Before he became a Wake superintendent, Bill McNeal started teaching in Raleigh City Schools in 1974 at then-Carroll Junior High School. He taught eighth-grade social studies in Room 200, he still recalls. After two years of teaching, he moved up to assistant principal, then moved over to principal at East Garner Middle School.
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While at Carroll, he could see the city was losing students after integration. Many white students moved out of city schools into county schools. The county was bursting at the seams. The logical next step, to some, was to merge the districts, rather than build new schools in the county while city schools remained underenrolled.
But local leaders had already put the question to voters in 1973. They roundly rejected it, by a two-to-one margin.
Still, local business leaders held fast to the merger.
“They wanted to keep the schools in the city strong,” McNeal said. Most major businesses were in downtown Raleigh, and they wanted to keep attracting talent. A quality school system can help entice companies.
Business leaders went to school leaders. Conrad Hooper, the city superintendent, and Aaron Fussell, the county superintendent, went to the General Assembly, where state lawmakers passed a bill forcing the merger of the two districts.
A federal order for more desegregation in Raleigh, poor facility usage and the loss of students all played a role in their push for the state law, McNeal said.
“Regardless of their reasons, it ended up, in my opinion, being the right decision,” he said.
It was a decision that set up the Wake County Public School System as it’s known now, a countywide school system following in the footsteps of other North Carolina school districts. It’s a decision that helped the district avoid the major desegregation lawsuits of many other southern towns and cities that lasted decades and cost untold millions of dollars in attorneys' fees.
With federal actions over desegregation in mind, the merger also spawned school assignments designed to spread students across the district. It eventually bore magnet schools, a tool that drew many white families into schools in Black neighborhoods.
Magnet and specialty programs drew families to schools well outside of their neighborhoods and even towns.
But the quality of many schools also drew people to certain neighborhoods, McNeal said.
And many people bought homes as adults near the schools they had attended as children.
“They integrated areas that wouldn’t have been integrated before, simply because they made friends over here in the school that they would not have made friends before and felt a lot more comfortable doing that,” McNeal said. “So when we talk about even in the area where I live, I see the number of kids who are there and kids of color who would not necessarily be there had it not been for the Wake County School. So for me, it’s built a stronger community.”
‘Clandestine’ desegregation
Dudley Flood spent much of his career traveling across North Carolina — often on short notice — to help school systems desegregate.
The work wasn’t easy. Words and names for him weren’t always kind.
But for Flood, who is Black, it was a calling.
He was a technical assistance advisor for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, charged with helping any school district along the way toward complying with the monumental U.S. Supreme Court desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Traveling often with his white colleague Gene Causby, Flood also worked with the U.S. Department of Education, then a small government agency, to get as much help toward the work as he could. Their roles were low-key, their help provided upon invitation only. The state didn’t want to be seen as having power, Flood recalled.
“It was virtually clandestine,” Flood said. “We didn’t go around talking.”
Not everyone liked them when they came through, he said. He didn’t let that bother him.
He and Causby modeled what needed to be done.
“We modeled the fact that how a Black man and a white man can get along was never a notion of who's white and who's black and who's this and who's that,” Flood recalled. “It was, ‘We've got to get this job done.’ And we loved each other.”
Causby died in 2014.
North Carolina, like many states, didn’t immediately embrace desegregation. Lawmakers passed bills that gave local school boards broader authority to deny transfer requests to Black students. They also approved a private school tuition grant, funded with public dollars, for families who didn’t want their children to attend an integrated school. The grant program, part of the broader program known as the Pearsall Plan, was eventually declared unconstitutional.
Desegregation was slow in many parts of the state, as neighborhoods remained segregated from one another and white families transferred to schools with higher populations of white students.
That happened in Wake County, too, where white families left Raleigh City Schools to go to Wake County Schools.
Eventually, federal authorities took notice.
Raleigh had been sued, and it also had been forced under a federal directive to create its own desegregation plan, said Carmen Wimberly Cauthen, an area researcher and daughter of a former long-time Wake school board member. Wake County feared it would be next, and that it would have to do whatever Raleigh was going to be forced to do.
Raleigh ended up having to ensure no school had less than 15% and no more than 45% of minority students, McNeal said.
“The change came from the realization of those three things: that fiscally we were better off, you certainly had access to a greater range of employability for people, and you had more opportunity to have every student have an equal educational opportunity,” Flood said.
Why NC districts abandoned city systems
Wake and Raleigh weren’t the first school districts to merge into a county district.
Charlotte and Mecklenburg County merged earlier. So did Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.
Early in the desegregation era, many towns had their own school districts, some with as few as three or four schools, Flood recalled. At some point, the economics of that didn’t make sense anymore. People could see staff duplicated across their small communities, merely because the districts were separate. And, amid the national mandate of desegregation, leaders noticed the quality of education wasn’t the same among the neighboring districts. After extensive deliberations, they merged with one another.
“You had to ensure that each of the students had access to an equal opportunity for education, and you could not do that by having money in many school districts scattered around,” Flood said. “Fiscally, you couldn't do it. Physically, you couldn't do it.”
It wasn’t easy to merge.
School districts would try, Flood recalled, and there would be riots, walkouts, protests over the mergers. That’s when he’d get called in.
He got called in to help in Hyde County, where Black families boycotted a desegregation plan that eliminated Black teachers. The county’s schools closed for the entire 1968-69 school year, ended only by pressure from the federal government and courts, eventually allowing the Black teachers to keep their jobs. That contrasted with the more typical outcome of mergers resulting in historically Black schools closing and Black teachers losing their jobs.
In Wake, some Black staff lost their jobs, and some primarily Black schools were forced to change or close. They started losing students.
Wake avoided some closures through the use of magnet or specialty programs, which proliferated in the 1980s, shortly after the merger. Those were intended to draw white families in from the bedroom communities of Raleigh into Raleigh schools that had mostly Black students, typically under the promise that their children would get unique and high-quality academic opportunities. The first one was Mary E. Phillips school, converted from an elementary school into a high school that offered on-site childcare for students who were parents. White students from outside of the Beltline rushed to apply, Flood recalled.
“That demonstrated to [Superintendent Walter Marks] and others that if you were to offer something that was in the benefit of persons to whom you were offering, they would at least put themselves in position to see if this works,” Flood said.
Today, roughly one-quarter of the district’s 200 schools has a magnet program.
The district became one of the top districts in the country for offering magnet programs, said Wake’s current superintendent, Robert Taylor. “And so it is about knowing and understanding that was a bold step taken by this community to merge into one district, and that we did things that were to the benefit of our students.”
A 1960s lawsuit in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools resulted in the finding that busing across a school district was a legal way to desegregate.
Wake began doing that, too. They reassigned neighborhoods across towns to achieve racial balance. Then, in the mid-2000s, when another U.S. Supreme Court ruled against reassignment for race-based reasons, the district began focusing reassignment around achieving economic balance in schools’ student bodies.
Parents would complain about the amount of time their children would be spending commuting school.
Flood would talk to those parents and frame that as a tradeoff that he’d say was worth it.
“That was one of the sacrifices we were going to have for hopefully getting you a better quality
of education than you're having now,” Flood.
Getting community buy-in
To make the merger, and its subsequent necessary reassignment, work required buy-in, McNeal said.
“If you're going to move students, you better make certain that they're moving to a quality school,” he said.
Parents are going to look up their new school, and they’ll want to know if it’s a good one, he said.
“So the question is: How do you create a district where kids are succeeding no matter where they are?” he said. “That was the driver behind the focus on academics in the district.”
But excellence is somewhat of a moving target, he said.
A school district can be very good but will always have room for growth, but its student body is always changing. McNeal calls it a “parade” of people passing through, and classes and generations change.
Paulette Malone Hicks was one of the Wake County Public School System’s first kindergarten teachers, starting at mostly white Douglas Elementary in Raleigh just before the merger before going to the new child development center that had opened at Athens Drive High School and working with preschool children. As soon as the merger happened, she felt a much stronger directive for rigorous academics, even for the new district’s youngest children. The number of standards increased.
Hicks described the merger as a culture shock.
Boosting that academic rigor put pressure on teachers, she said.
After the merger, Hicks, McNeal and other teachers and administrators would meet informally at one another’s homes, schools, churches and other places to help one another navigate the merger. They’d meet every two weeks or more often.
The focus was on integration, she said.
“So many of us who saw the need, and we would just come together to see how can we make these things work,” Hicks recalled. “How can we see that all children feel important, and that they're special, and we can blend in these different cultures and bring in diversity. It was exciting. It was good. I miss it. It was a good feeling, a good group of people who had the same goals and objectives about schools, and not only schools, community, because that's important as well.”