Funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the small-school concept operates under the belief that smaller schools allow for closer relationships between teachers and students and that those improved relationships will foster higher student achievement.

Wake County established the first of the existing small schools — the East Wake School of Health Sciences — at the start of the 2005-06 school year. The next year, the School of Integrated Technology was created.

The program was not fully implemented until the 2007-08 school year when the School of Arts, Education and Global Studies and the School of Engineering Sciences were established.

In other words, East Wake has fully operated under the new model for less than two years.

School board member Lori Millberg expects the board to decide on the projects future once preliminary test data is revealed next month.

Simply put, there hasn’t been enough time to know for certain that the concept works or doesn’t work.

We trust that cooler heads will prevail when it comes time to decide whether to follow through on the experiment.

Standardized test scores have been poor at East Wake for a long time. In an age when it takes two or three years to build a school building and years more to plan and prepare for construction of that school, our elected leaders should understand that exacting change in a school’s culture is also a slow-moving process.

School leaders have been up front about the challenges they have faced establishing the small-schools at East Wake.

Wake County’s Board of Education entered into the small-school experiment with an admission that problems existed at the high school.

They owe it to the students — and all the residents of eastern Wake County — to give the experiment a full and fair opportunity to succeed.

Once the four small schools have been up and running for five years, school system leaders should assess the progress — or lack thereof — and decide on what course to plot.

Johnny Whitfield Managing Editor