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February 24, 2006
Nandi-Amaris Daniels has a very interesting post today on the relationship of school districting and home selection. She also includes links to the newest redistricting maps.
I hate to say it, but as time goes on I am less and less a fan of social engineering through redistricting. And why are they picking on High Point? My kids' school is almost all white. Dudley is almost all black. Why don’t they bus some Northwest kids to Dudley and some Dudley kids to Northwest? Is it that they don’t scream as loud in High Point?
The problem with Ms. Daniel’s root assumption is that one cannot predict today what the school system will do tomorrow.
I was a desegregation guinea pig. I can still remember as if it were yesterday standing with some other guys on the pitcher’s mound after a baseball game the Spring of seventh grade, 1970, when we found out where were going to school the next year. I had been going to CraytonJunior High School. OK, it was mostly white. So was my neighborhood and my side of town. I didn’t choose where I was born. That was just the deal.
But this little teeny strip of School District I on the other side of Trenholm Road was needed, they had decided, to upgrade the ratio of white kids at what would now be called FairwoldMiddle School. Fairwold was right dab in the middle of the largest black voting precinct in the state of South Carolina. I had never heard of it. It was three times farther from my house than Crayton. I was a white kid, a number, a percentage.
The truth is I didn’t like Crayton, and I did like Fairwold. Man, was it an exciting year. Bomb threats. Fights. Razor blades across cheeks. Class boycotts. But I made good friends there, real friends, better friends than I ever had at Crayton. And I loved Mr. Sanders our principle. Fairwold is now called SandersMiddle School. He was a good man.
I knew kids with guns, knives, razor blades, metal pipes. I carried a metal pipe in my pant leg, just in case. One of my problems was that I was a little geek, a teacher’s pet. OK, I was the President of the Honors Society. The teacher would need something from the library. “Joe,” (that's what they called me back then), “would you go down and get this book from Mrs. Jones.” Great. You see at Fairwold about 10% of the white kids and 10% of the black kids were real trouble makers, and they made life miserable for everybody else. We were always on pins and needles. A trip to the library alone was dangerous. Going to the library meant walking down 2-3 long corridors, which meant you had a better than average chance of being pulled into a bathroom and having the crap beat out of you. And I’m just talking about boys. Girls….now that was ugly stuff there…
Well, I could go on and on about Fairwold, but the odd thing is, I had a good year and made lots of friends. I was all set to go to the Keenan High School when the brainiacs at Central Office decided the racial balances needed a little more tweaking, so, they changed my neighborhood back to the high school I would have gone to had they never messed with things in the first place, and instead of achieving racial balance at the high school by busing in the white kids, they bused in the black kids.
Well, I felt jerked around. Right at a very vulnerable stage in my own life I was ripped away from the folks who had become my best friends. And then, afterward, we never knew if we were going to go to this school or that, but as it turned out I finished at the high school at which I started.
I am a fan of integrated schools, most other things being equal. My life is better for having been to Fairwold, and for having been to a 50/50 mixed high school, other things being equal. But my life suffered from being jerked around by the District. It took me a long time to make good friends at the new high school – a long time. All my good friends were at another school. I was very alone at an age when that's not really good.
It’s hard on kids being jerked around from school to school. It’s hard on parents not knowing what school their neighborhood will be a part of next time they decide to fiddle with the lines. It's hard on parents having their kids at school a half hour away. I feel for the people of High Point. I think they are getting jerked around. So why are they jerking around the good people of High Point but not the good people of Northwest High and Dudley? What’s with that?
Despite my preference for integrated schools, I have come to believe that it is better for kids to attend schools closer to their homes if they can. There will still be changes as population densities change, as new schools are built, but such changes will be more understandable, and more predictable.
Eventually white and black and hispanic and oriental people will have to decide whom they want to go to school with by where they live. I know that income plays a part in that, and that makes me sad. But I still think neighborhood schools, with more parental involvement, and more home grown teachers and administrators would be best. Come to think of it I think neighborhood districts would be best. Maybe it’s time we rethought the whole county wide system thing. Let’s just cut the county more or less into four pieces and make four districts. Or six. Let’s go local. Anyone up for a referendum?
That's my two cents...
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