When Hillsborough County first rolled out its new school choice plan, critics weren’t sure that it would accomplish its goal of resegregation, but, defying the naysayers, the school board has managed to turn the clock back 50 years in an impressively short period of time.
The plan is brilliant in its simplicity, yet just burdensome enough to discourage undesirable students from actually making a choice, thus ensuring that the good schools are able to fill up with a homogeneous non-mix of students on their way to one of Florida’s lily white universities, while the poor schools are left to make do with underachievers and other undesirables.
First, the school board crafted rules that put the burden on poor and minority parents to take action if they wanted their kids to remain in the better school away from their neighborhoods. If parents desired a healthy learning environment they were to fill out a school choice application. Or maybe just an intent to return form. Before one deadline or another. If the proper application was not returned to the school board, the children would be housed in neighborhood schools.
The only group of students who had to make this choice were those who were being bused to desirable schools from poor neighborhoods. Whiter, wealthier kids were simply kept in the good schools nearer to their homes.
If parents from poor neighborhoods failed to indicate a preference to have their children return to the good school which they had been attending, they were to indicate which schools they would rather attend. The only catch: all the good schools were already full of wealthy kids, so there was no room for any students from other neighborhoods.
Now, there were a few glithces at first – some parents of poor and minority students who managed to jump through the confusing application process which involved multiple forms and deadlines were actually informed that their kids would be going to good schools. Thanks to the work of some alert wealthy parents, they were soon set straight.
Blaming a computer glitch, Hillsborough school officials said Tuesday that dozens of students were wrongly assigned to crowded schools through the new controlled choice process.
The computer incorrectly enrolled students in schools in which there is no available space, officials said.
The error means these students will not be able to attend their chosen schools next fall despite being notified by mail last week that they could.
……Students will be enrolled in other schools in their area, preferably those they listed as their second or third choices – as long as those schools have room.
“We’re checking name by name, school by school,” said deputy superintendent Randy Poindexter. “This has to be corrected.”
The problem is the biggest one so far for the choice plan, a new method of assigning students to schools that replaces busing for desegregation. About 47,000 students were eligible to fill out their top three choices of schools in seven geographic regions.
Less than two weeks ago, administrators said 84 percent of the 6,488 students who participated in the choice plan received their first pick of schools.
But as the numbers of students assigned to specific schools began trickling out last week, parents at crowded campuses, including Wilson Middle and Mitchell Elementary, wanted to know why more children were being packed into their already-burgeoning classrooms.
Wilson parent Leigh Joyner complained in an e-mail to School Board members.
“I understand that with Wilson’s outstanding performance it is one of the more desirable middle schools to attend – but at what cost?” she wrote. “Giving someone outside the boundaries the choice to attend an already overcrowded school does not make the school choice program successful.”
Wilson and Plant High parent Jeanne Tate said she has no problem with additional students assigned to her children’s schools if there’s room. But since the schools are packed, she said she believes more crowded conditions would take away from the learning process there.
“We’re very fortunate we have the quality education those schools provide in a public school setting,” she said. “We certainly don’t want to detract from that.”
The school district has a general policy of closing enrollment at schools at 100 percent of capacity. Through the choice program, students were only supposed to be assigned to schools where space was available.
Poindexter said a random review of student assignments showed many anomalies. One was that several Burns Middle School students who are currently bused for desegregation are now assigned through the choice program to Wilson, which is over capacity.
The students should have been assigned to either Coleman, Madison or Monroe middle schools, all of which have space. Wilson, with 637 students, is built to hold 554.
Coleman, Madison and Monroe have room because no one who is concerned about a strong education wants their kids to go to those schools. But they should be good enough for poor kids, right?
Derwin and Loretha Bozeman applied for choice by the Jan. 9 deadline. They showed up with a worn notification card saying they got their first choice of Tampa’s Wilson Middle School for their daughter, Bianqa, who has been attending Pierce Middle School. They then got a letter saying they failed to participate in choice and needed to come to Tuesday’s meeting, they said.
“We were told we can go to either Booker T. Washington or back to Pierce,” Derwin Bozeman said. “We want Wilson. It’s the only blue-ribbon school in the area, and we live closer to Wilson than Pierce.”
As of Friday, the family had made no decision. “This is like a big evacuation of air from the balloon. We don’t know what we’re going to do.”
The Bozeman family is among a group of 1,500 families the district erroneously assigned to already-crowded schools. They were all supposed to be called, but the Bozemans said they never were.
Choose One Or The Other
Other families said they had applied for choice and magnet programs and were confused about assignments.
That was another problem for the district, Evans said. Families were encouraged to apply for choice and magnet schools, and computers were supposed to sort them out. Instead, they were assigned to both, snapping up spots that others could have had.
Now families dissatisfied with their assignments are being encouraged to apply for special assignments to any district school they want as long as it has room and they provide their own transportation. The deadline is June 30.
Stupid poor people: they should have known that they wouldn’t be allowed to send their daughter to a decent school. Now they’ve gotten all agitated about it. All they have to do is buy their kid a car or provide some other form of reliable transportation and they can send her to any school in the county. Well, any school that is not already full. What’s the big deal?
Anyway, as the resegregation plan started showing results, the school board realized that it had a problem on its hands: so many poor and minority students were being displaced that there just wasn’t enough room in the neighborhood ghetto schools to contain all the kids. Something had to be done, so the school board dusted off some moldy old buildings and declared them fit for learning.
Washington K-8 and James K-8 schools started the school year without enough books, teachers and working toilets.
Students at two others, Oak Park Elementary and Franklin Middle, remain in portable classrooms for a second full year. There’s limited computer access for Franklin students because their portables lack enough security.
Admittedly surprised by the spike, district officials rushed extra tutors to some of the schools in advance of this week’s FCAT testing. They will begin special teacher training in the summer and plan a separate teacher recruiting day, where they will offer more money to experienced teachers.
Frustrated parents are taking note.
“As far as this school getting a fair shake, I don’t see it happening,” said Dwayne Ellis, Franklin’s PTA president. His two daughters attend the school.
A year ago, a dozen Hillsborough public schools reported nearly 90 percent or more of their children qualified for free or reduced-price meals based on federal guidelines.
Now there are 23 such schools, a transition tied to a district plan to let some families choose their own schools.
……Hillsborough is following a nationwide pattern of resegregation as it enters its first year of school choice.
The choice plan, which went into effect in August, allows families of certain students to choose from schools in their assigned region as long as there is room. That includes families living in Tampa’s generally impoverished inner core, where forced busing to the suburbs took place for decades to desegregate schools. It ended this year.
Few families from the inner core ended up choosing schools, so most were assigned to their neighborhood schools.
“This was a predictable outcome,” said Sam Horton, president of the Hillsborough County branch of the NAACP and a retired educator. “It was about this way in 1954. It’s no different now.”
Of course it was a predictable outcome: the plan was well designed from the beginning to unfairly place the burden on poor and minority parents to educate themselves about the confusing different application deadlines and requirements that were needed just to allow their kids to remain where they were. If there was room. See, if there was room, that meant that the school wasn’t all that desirable.
Then some brilliant computer ‘glitches’ caused many kids whose parents had successfully navigated the labyrinthine application process to be thrown back to inferior homeland schools thus sparing the privileged children the extreme burden of sharing their good fortune.
But the proof is in the numbers. Just how well is this plan actually working to divide the school system into two or more separate and decidedly unequal educational experiences? Let’s see:
In the last year before school choice, 53 schools had fewer than 30 percent white students. Now the number is 77. Fourteen of those schools are more than 60 percent Hispanic, up from 10 during busing. Nineteen are more than 60 percent African-American, up from 13.
Good job!
For background on Hillsborough’s Homeland Schools Initiatrive, see the following BlogWood posts:
School choice separate but equal
I served for a two-year term on the Choice Advisory Committee and there were many reasons why it seemed to make no progress. At one point I requested that the committee develop a point-by- point response to the press coverage hoping this would permit those of us who were citizen members to make useful recommendatons, but no one would do so. My only success was to ensure that my efforts to get a response to the press were in the minutes…but I was not successful in getting a response.
I was a representative of the Hispanic Services Council and duly informed them of my concerns. Initially I had great hopes for the Choice initiative, but it did not bear fruit. Rather than continue my involvement as I hit a brick wall I did resign.