That's all the time the Wake County Board of Education needed to wait before plunging forward with a decision to revamp the school system's student assignment policy.

By December, a new board would be in place and, while it's unclear at this point if the ideological makeup of the school board will change, it is certain that the people who will have to administer this new policy weren't all at the table when this decision was made.

In fact, three newly elected school board members sat in the audience earlier this month, pleading with the school board to hold off on a final decision, to no avail.

This kind of under-the-wire action isn't new. Presidents sign scores of executive orders just before they leave office.

A couple of years ago, the Wendell town board adopted a UDO as one of its final acts, only to see the new board of commissioners rescind that action a month or so later.

It is possible, of course, that come November, a newly reconstituted school board could undo this week's action and take a more cautious course.

But for the next two months, WCPSS staff will be directed to begin work on the new policy, alerting parents to changes, fine-tuning attendance zones and taking care of the myriad tasks that come with such a massive change of policy.

When the new school board convenes, its members will be faced with the option of accepting what has been thrust upon the county or trashing two months of work by the school system staff. Neither of those options are all that good.

Superintendent Tony Tata's plan seems to have allayed many of the fears raised by minority Democrats and, so it's quite possible, if the Democrats come to control the board in December, that they would have OK'd the plan on their own.

It would have been best if the school board had exhibited just the slightest bit of patience.

But that has not been its habit over the past two years, so perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised that, once again, the race to the finish seems to be all the school board could focus on.