KNIGHTDALE — When leaders from the Wake County Education Partnership came to Knightdale to share facts, figures and arguments for why it supports diversity, one number caught the attention of both a diversity doubter and a diversity advocate. Wake Education Partnership Vice President of Communications Tim Simmons said according to figures in the three-year reassignment plan, 1,246 students are moved each year for reasons other than growth.

Simmons said if one-third of those students were moved for diversity alone that would mean only 411 students were moved for diversity reasons. The Wake County Board of Education tries to achieve balance in English proficiency, free-to-reduced lunch ratios, special education, modular units and distance, and to provide correlating feeder schools from elementary to high school. Wake County Public School System board member Ron Margiotta, an opponent of the diversity policy, asked if the number was too low to achieve diversity.

In reacting to the number, Knightdale Mayor Russell Killen, a proponent of diversity, concurred with Margiotto.

“It needs to move more students,” he said. “You need to be hot or cold, if you’re luke warm, you’re going to get spit out.” Killen said eastern Wake County should benefit from the diversity policy.

Killen said eastern Wake County has high percentages of free and reduced lunch populations in its schools.

He said the system’s diversity policy achieved through magnet schools means there should be more of them in eastern Wake County.

Wake Partnership President Ann Denlinger agreed that children in eastern Wake County need programs, but said in advocating for them it’s important not to take away from other areas.

“We need to take the politics out of the system,” Killen said. “I understand it’s hard to make a decision when you got a room full of screaming parents. It needs to be transparent for all of us.”

Killen said the system policy should be that the magnet programs at schools are automatically phased out if their percentage of free to reduced lunch students fall below the system’s goal of 40 percent.

Denlinger and Simmons pointed out that there have always been reassignments since the county and city school systems merged in ’70s.

“My first years of teaching in Wake County I taught in a downtown school with black kids, the most wonderful kids you would ever see, but I for one saw that separate was not equal,” said Denlinger.

Forsyth, Durham and Guilford counties have resegregated, Denlinger said.

But Wake County end-of-course exams show higher scores than those counties in all categories — white, middle class, black, Hispanic and low-income.

And Wake County compares favorably with Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools’ scores on end-of-course exams.

Wake County schools first integrated by race and now by family income.

The partnership said other districts see Wake County is far more integrated. It also sees the district as a reason for the area’s explosive growth.

Wake County spends $541.56 per student on busing compared to $651.70 in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, $572.36 in Forsyth County, $767.05 in Durham County and $682.899 in Guilford County.

Simmons said students are bused no more than 10 miles from their base schools and that the school system tries to maintain no student spends more than 45 minutes on a bus.

Research shows that there is a correlation between poverty and school performance.

All students perform better in schools with strong middle-class populations than they do in high poverty schools, the partnership reports.

The partnership also maintains that students from more affluent families who attend schools reflecting diverse income levels are not adversely affected by diversity.

A 2004 U.S. Department of Education report showed that schools where at least 75 percent were students from low-income families had three times as many uncertified or out-of-field teachers in English and science than schools with lower concentrations of poverty.

Partnership leaders said that research shows integration improves academic achievements and graduation rates. And many institutions from Ivy League universities to Fortune 500 companies recognize racial diversity as important.