Margiotta continues to push New Jersey model, confrontation

It hasn’t taken a rocket scientist to see what Wake County school board chair Ron Margiotta has been trying to orchestrate for a long time. Yesterday, he once again confirmed it in just the place where one would expect to have the chair of the supposedly non-partisan school board announce his plans – the Northern Wake Republican Club. The plan? Why breaking up Wake County’s unified school district, of course. Click here to watch WRAL TV’s coverage of the talk.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, Margiotta (along with chief crony John Tedesco) is a transplant from New Jersey. That state is home to more than 600 separate school districts – a lot of them like the tiny, affluent one on whose school board Margiotta used to serve. That’s clearly the model that he and his allies are attempting to foist upon North Carolina with their plans for “neighborhood assignment zones.”

Great! Just what we need: an even more insular, divided, and segregated county with more walls and reasons for people not to interact with anyone different from themselves. With any luck, it’ll only be a matter of a few years before we too can enjoy other joys of “The Garden State” – huge pockets of urban decay and despair, vast freeway sprawl, a mushrooming collection of gated communities, and, what one recent report from a conservative group described as the largest number of “private” public schools (i.e. segregated and inaccessible to low and moderate income kids) in the country.

Fortunately, Margiotta is sticking to his plans of pursuing his objectives in a moderate, inclusive and collaborative fashion…NOT! Not only is this guy vowing to push ahead no matter what the cost, in yesterday’s talk he practically invited court challenges to his heavy-handed plans. And why not? Now that his policies and hiring decisions are serving as a vehicle for funneling wasteful legal fees to the law firm of a high-powered conservative power broker, he can continue to kill two birds with one stone: ruining one of the best counties in the country and bolstering the treasure chest of his own political allies.