In recent months, Mayor Harold Weinbrecht has held audience with numerous parents of Cary students, many of whom were deeply frustrated by issues like the Wake County school board’s reassignment proposal that resulted in a plan to move 24,654 students to different schools over the next three years.

Some of those parents have also attended recent meetings of the Cary Town Council to plead with Weinbrecht to be more vocal on their behalf. But unlike some other mayors in southwestern Wake County, Weinbrecht, who just entered the second year of his first term in office, had until recently chosen to remain silent.

“My position during the first year was that what some of the mayors were doing — criticizing [the school board] in public — didn’t accomplish anything,” Weinbrecht said during a recent interview. “I didn’t think that was beneficial to their citizens. It gave them false hope.”

Weinbrecht said some Cary residents have been vigilant in their requests for him to follow the lead of his fellow mayors, including Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly. “What some of the citizens who wanted me to speak said was that they wanted me to criticize the board in public,” he said. “But I said that doesn’t serve a purpose.”

Still, it was at the urging of some residents who told Weinbrecht that they merely wanted him to represent their interests to the school board that the mayor decided to reevaluate his personal policy on speaking publicly before other government officials. He first broke his silence on Jan. 5, addressing the school board on the reassignment plan and on the school system’s economic diversity policy.

The decision didn’t come without reservations. “… I didn’t want to give people false hope since we weren’t the decision makers,” Weinbrecht wrote on his personal blog in an entry dated Jan. 11. “In addition, I didn’t want to damage relationships since we were and are in a lobbying position. But after years of witnessing the harm of constant reassignment, I decided it was worth the risk of speaking in public.”

Weinbrecht used a greater portion of his time during that first meeting to suggest that the economic diversity policy wasn’t having its intended effect. As the mayor recounted on his blog days after the meeting, he said efforts to balance the number of low-income students at Wake schools “is causing many families to leave the school system because it is not worth the yearly struggle.”

Weinbrecht went on to tell the school board that, from his own experience, “I can tell you that policies should always be revisited and studied, especially when it is viewed by the public as causing more harm than good.”

The Cary mayor seemed even more passionate about that issue during a Feb. 5 meeting in Holly Springs in which parents and elected officials gathered to discuss how to find and support school board members who would back community-based schools. According to a News & Observer article published Feb. 6, Weinbrecht was quoted as saying, “I can advocate that the diversity policy is not succeeding. That doesn’t give power to anyone. The power is at the ballot box.”

The mayor later told The Cary News that his remarks were not intended as a call to action against the school board members, with whom Weinbrecht said he has built strong relationships. “In Holly Springs, what I said might have sounded more forceful,” he said. “I just said that to change policy, you have to change the policymakers. You do that at the voting booth. It’s a fact, not a personal attack.”

Weinbrecht did not say whether he would place any limitations on the frequency of his public remarks. But Weinbrecht did say that, despite how his comments in Holly Springs might have been perceived, he remains committed to fostering solid relations with the Wake school board.

“We have been meeting with them on a regular basis,” he said, referring to himself and others on the Cary Town Council. “Ever since I was elected, we’ve been meeting with them. And we’re developing good relationships.”