I attended a candidate question and answer session at Baileywick Park last night, which was truly wonderful. My favorite part of campaigning is talking with people about the issues. Not just telling them my viewpoints, but hearing theirs and having conversations. This has been true for me during all my years of advocacy on various school issues. I always come away with something positive from these conversations: an argument I had never thought of, a different interpretation of an argument, and always something to think about. So last night was wonderful because we had conversations. It got a little heated at times, but it was respectful and productive and I walked away with all kinds of thoughts spinning in my head.
The greatest conversations for me were about the Choice Plan. I rarely meet anybody who likes the choice plan and the ones who do say it's because "I get to pick which school I want". When we start talking about the lack of guarantees, however, they aren't so enthusiastic. But last night I heard from some parents who really like the choice model and for a good reason: nobody gets kicked out of their current school.
The parents I met have high schoolers and older children who went through the system. They've lived in Raleigh for many years--before developments like Falls River, Riverside, Bedford and Wakefield existed. As additional schools were built to handle the new growth, these families got reassigned from their 'neighborhood schools' to make room for newcomers. Not fair, in their eyes, and I completely understand their point of view. They want to stay in the school community they've been a part of for years.
I keep thinking about communities moving forward under this plan. I worry about the new family who moves into a neighborhood where most of the kids go to a school that isn't even on the new 'choice list' (this is the case for my node) or is so full that rising kindergarteners and other new students get bumped to a farther away school. What happens to our sense of community then? Or to the support that our communities at large give to our schools?
Complicating the situation is the fact that we've never had 'normal' reassignments. When a new school opened up it wasn't just the logical neighborhoods that were moved to fill the school--'diversity' was always taken into account, which often ended up creating a domino effect moving more students than truly necessary. Would parents have been as upset if the moves were logical? Would a family-friendly grandfathering policy have made a difference?
Whatever the new plan ends up looking like, we need to make sure our decisions are based on how things should be and not based on a reaction to the nonsensical moves of the past. There are still a lot of questions to be answered and many that haven't been asked yet. We all need to continue to talk about the assignment plan and ask questions. I was encouraged last night at Baileywick Park and I hope people continue to engage each other in conversation. It's the only way we'll ever get where we need to be.
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People got pushed into the choice plan as it was middle ground between the old diversity plan and a pure neighborhood school plan. The old plan had problems but it had started moving toward choice of calendar which was a start. It still had the problems that the top 5-10% of bus trips were too long but a small group of vocal people pushed for neighborhood schools. The problem is that those pushing it such as Tedesco and the chairman never defined what neighborhood or community schools were and were extremely abrasive in their planning and presentation. Therefore when the blue plan/choice plan came about, that seem to be the lesser of the choies given between the green plan (same as old plan) and nothing. If they had actually provided 3 choices, blue plan, green plan (old way) and a modified green plan with the top 10% of bus trips eliminated there would have been a different conversation.
The problem now is that the choice plan is getting diluted in loss of choice by limiting seats for achievement schools, magnet vs non-magnet feeder patterns and feeder patterns overriding choice at key points of K, 6th, and 9th grade. There is not choice if I as a parent want to choose from my list of middle schools and I choose one that is not in my feeder pattern and there are only a handful of schools. Guess what, when I pick an elementary school when the kid is K, that is not an indication of where I want them to go for middle and high school. Lots of things change in that time and I may want to go to a better middle school based on the current data when the kid is ready to start 6th grade or when the kid is ready for high school. Programs will change in that time, transportation changes, and a lot of other things. Ask those people starting high school in 2012-2013 if they believe they knew enough about that decision 9 years ago when putting their kid into K.
Choice means choice, not a facade of choice when very few people actually get in due to limited seats. Right now the feeder plan and the chaos of moving nodes to different schools means all those people complaining about there old node assignments get to push their opinion with little audit and oversight and get what they want. So the vocal minority pushing get what they want and everybody else is left holding the bag.
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