Bifurcated Constituency

The September 18, 2013 edition of This Week Hilliard ran a story titled "Board Developing Goals to Evaluate Marschhausen," in which I am quoted as saying that we have a "bifurcated constituency" here in our school district. The story said I pulled that phrase from a book I had a recently read, but actually it was of my own choice of words. The book I mentioned is The Diverse Schools Dilemma by Michael Petrilli.

So what did I mean?

The short answer is that our school district serves two broad sets of students: those who are economically disadvantaged, and those who aren't. Petrilli describes the different needs of those two sets:  the parents of economically disadvantaged children want the schools to concentrate on basic reading, writing and arithmetic, while the affluent parents want enrichment programs for their kids.

The huge urban and the poorer rural districts therefore need to devote most of their resources to the basics. The small number of ultra-affluent enclaves can spend their money on fantastic enrichment programming.

But the suburban districts - like us - are increasingly being caught in the middle, with both a significant population of economically disadvantaged students, and a sizable fraction of kids from affluent homes - plus the whole spectrum between. That sets up a tension as to how scarce resources should be allocated.

If that's a sufficient answer to the question of what I meant by "bifurcated constituency," you can stop here. But I hope you will read on.

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Petrilli is the executive vice president of the Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank which originated in Dayton, and is now based in Washington DC. Petrilli wrote this book for parents who had decided to move back into the urban center and wanted, like him, to have their own kids attend the public schools. Petrilli's wanted his kids to grow up understanding how to navigate in an America with ever-increasing cultural, racial, and economic diversity. He discovered some pretty interesting stuff in his search for the best school to meet that goal.

It is well accepted that there is a strong correlation between poverty and academic performance. Here is a chart showing data published by the Ohio Department of Education, depicting 100 public school districts in the central Ohio region:

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This chart shows clearly the correlation between poverty and academic performance, but we should be cautious about drawing conclusions. It's possible that there a direct cause-and-effect relationship here, but there are certainly other factors in play. In other words, we can't assume a simple solution - that simply raising the standard of living for folks in poverty will also raise the academic performance of their children in school. I suspect that such an effort would have little effect, yet be cripplingly expensive for our economy. Unfortunately, a good deal of public policy seems to develop based on such faulty conclusions, because they play well in the political area.

I won't pretend to understand all the reasons for this correlation between poverty and performance, but I have spent a couple of years volunteering as a reading tutor at Sullivant Elementary of the Columbus City Schools, as part of the Columbus Tutoring Initiative (more on this later). Over 90% of the students at Sullivant are classified as Economically Disadvantaged (ie the family income is below 185% of the Federal Poverty Guideline). The Performance Index for this school, a measure used on the State Report Card, is 54.5% - extremely low (our district has an overall Performance Index of 103.6%).

Another factor regarding Sullivant, which is not published on the State Report Card, is that fewer than half of the parents have completed high school. This is what I believe is the root cause of the high levels of poverty - the parents don't have enough education to secure jobs which provide a living wage. But it's not the poverty that leads to low student achievement - it's that parents with little education are unlikely to model good learning behaviors for their kids, or help them learn basic skills prior to starting school.

Because these parents don't read well, they don't typically read to their kids. Nor do their kids see their parents curl up with a good book just for personal enjoyment. One second grade student I worked with bragged to me about his skills with some video game he played with his dad, which put him in high esteem with his peers, yet he could barely read the lowest level books.

Most of these parents want their kids to do well in school and have a better life. They just don't how to contribute to the process. So they count on the teachers in the public schools to make sure their kids learn the basic skills necessary to make it to high school graduation, learn a trade, and if possible, get into college.

Contrast this to kids who come from from homes higher on the economic ladder. Those parents have been able to qualify for high-paying jobs because they have more education. When they have kids, they read to them. We had a rocking chair in our kids' room, and we sat in that chair with a kid or two on our lap every night reading nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss books (thirty years later, and I can still recite the opening couple of pages of Cat in the Hat).

So I don't think it's poverty that leads to low academic performance of children - it's that poverty is usually an indicator of the parents' level of education, and it's that which determines what kind of head-start a kid gets in life. The primary role of the public education system is, in my opinion, to lift kids out of that environment, and help them become self-sustaining members of our society.  It's a matter of national survival as far as I'm concerned.

Back to the "bifurcated constituency" here in Hilliard.

Our school district is home to a broad spectrum of families. Some folks are very wealthy - just take a spin up Riverside Dr after the leaves have fallen and check out all the multi-million dollar homes along our side of the Scioto River. Some of the most expensive homes in Franklin County are in that stretch of a few miles. The property taxes alone on on the mansion built by the late Don Ettore are $116,000 per year!

While that kind of property is rare, there are thousands of homes in our school district valued at several hundred thousand dollars, occupied by owners well up the economic ladder. That's good for all of us.

At the same time, a quarter of our students are classified as Economically Disadvantaged. Some are students with roots going back many generations in this country, others are recent immigrants. Regardless of the cultural background, the students in this category tend to have parents who are unable to support their kids' academic development because of a lack of English language skills.

It shows up on page 9 of our State Report Card, the section titled "Gap Closing."  This section breaks out performance data, expressed as the percentage of students in each subgroup who achieve the Annual Measurable Objective (AMO) for the subject area. For 2013, the reading goal is to have 83.4% of the students be Proficient or better, and for Math it is 78.5%.

The subgroup breakdown for our district is:

Subgroup	Reading	Math
White	91.7%	89.8%
Multiracial	90.8%	87.1%
Asian/Pacific Islander	90.6%	94.0%
Economically Disadvantaged	79.9%	76.6%
African American*	79.0%	76.6%
Hispanic	77.8%	76.6%
Limited English	71.7%	70.7%
Students with Disabilities	64.4%	56.7%
Overall	90.1%	87.1%

*I believe the category "African American students" includes those students who are recent immigrants from Africa. Such students usually fall into three categories: African American (because no other racial category fits), Economically Disadvantaged, and Limited English. We don't have clear data for African American students who are not recent immigrants, but I assume that the performance correlation for this subgroup is not to race, but rather to economic status.

So while our Overall achievement is above the goal, the categories I've shown in bold are all below goal. Because so many of these subgroups are below goal, our overall rating for Gap Closing was a "D" - one of two "D"s we received on our report card.

What was the other "D"?  Ironically, it was in the Progress category for our Gifted Students (see page 7).

The needs of these two categories are diametrically opposite, a situation Petrilli found when he was investigating schools for his kids to attend in the Washington DC public school district. The Economically Disadvantaged students benefit most from being taught basic skills, regardless the grade level, but critically important at the primary level.

Meanwhile, the more affluent parents select a school district based on the quantity and quality of enrichment opportunities: gifted programming for elementary students, college level curriculum at the high school level, successful athletic programs, and superior performing arts organizations. They assume that their kids will breeze through the basic curriculum, and want them to have access to much more.

So it becomes a matter of resource allocation. Since 86% of our operating budget is used (appropriately) for the compensation and benefits of our team of teachers, staff and administrators, what decisions should we make about reconfiguring our team to address the issues pointed out on our State Report Card?

One reaction could be to simply disregard the State Report Card. I don't know what repercussions this might have, but typically the way the State gets school districts to comply is by threatening to take away funding. I've suggested on more than one occasion that we should just declare our district to be a charter school, and escape from most of the mandates which apply to a public school district. That's not as crazy at it seems - I bet we could run one building as the state-mandated K-12 public school, and sell the rest to a new charter school corporation, staffing the new charter school with the same team of teachers (who could continue to organize as the HEA if they want). The trick is how to do local funding, since only a public school district can levy local taxes.

That not being a very likely scenario, we might decide that the only way to bring up the performance of the Economically Disadvantaged students is to assign more teachers and other professionals to work with these students. Then we have another choice to make: do we create these new positions by passing additional levies to fund the additional compensation and benefits costs, or do we eliminate other programming and services so that the total personnel costs remain the same?

And if we decide that we're going to reallocate personnel, what programming and services are we willing to eliminate? Since we couldn't mess with basic, state mandated curriculum, the only candidates for elimination would be the enrichment programs I listed above.

But if we do that, at what point does our district become unattractive to the most affluent, and therefore most mobile members of our community. And if they start leaving, what happens to overall property values?

It's not hard to imagine. It would be a repeat of the "White Flight" that has all but destroyed most urban school districts around the country, although today it would be more accurate to call it the "Flight of the Affluent" as the upper income strata are now occupied by families of all racial and cultural backgrounds.

Hilliard would begin to look like South Linden, the Hilltop, Franklinton and many other Columbus neighborhoods which were once home to working class families, but are now mostly rental properties occupied by families living below the poverty line. Once well-maintained homes would fall into disrepair, further driving down property values, and employers would seek better places to base their operations. Income and property tax revenues would fall, diminishing the ability to fund city services and the schools.

It's a death spiral that results in communities that look like Whitehall or Groveport, once well-funded suburbs that have been suffering since the closure of DCSC and Lockborne Air Force Base.

So what's the solution?

I don't see that there is a single magic bullet. But that doesn't mean there is nothing to be done. Rather, I think we'll have to do a little of a lot of things. Here are few ideas:

• I do think we have to take a look at the richness of our high school course offerings. There are some classes we offer for which very few students sign up. But it's not a matter of saying "let's discontinue X and reassign the teachers to Y," as teachers are licensed in fairly narrow subjects, meaning the teachers of X aren't likely to be licensed to teach Y. This is a transition best done over many years as teachers retire, when we can replace an X teacher with a Y teacher rather painlessly. But if we're going to do this, we need start thinking it through and planning now.
• I think we need to explore ability-based grouping of students in the elementary levels. This is often called 'tracking,' and was the norm when I was in elementary school 50 years ago. At some point, the education community decided that it's harmful to low-performing students to be segregated from high-performing students.
  
  I recognize that I'm not a professional educator, but I think this is an experiment in social engineering that hasn't panned out. Petrilli rightly points out that this kind of segregation happens in the upper grades automatically: high performing students take the honors and AP classes while the low-performing students take less challenging electives.
  
  I've spent hundreds of hours in elementary classrooms over the past four years. One key thing I learned is that it's very challenging for our elementary teachers to deal with a classroom of 25 students who have performance levels ranging from barely able to read to some  who I suspect are the geniuses who will change our future. What "expert" determined that the notion of an elementary teacher sitting down to work with a small subset of students at one ability level while the rest of the kids are supposed to "work independently" makes any sense?
  
  Perhaps both the lower-performing kids and the higher-performing kids are best served by grouping kids by ability, allowing the teacher to spend all of her/his time with all of the students. It seemed to work for my generation.

There are no doubt many other things we should look at. But here's one that requires no money, no levy votes, and no bureaucracy:

I've been a volunteer in the Columbus Tutoring Initiative for the past four years. The first two years were spent at Sullivant Elementary, as I mentioned above. I had the privilege of working with the same student, Nicholas, for both years, as both a first and second grader. He started out not wanting to be in the program, as it meant giving up his mid-day recess once each week. But over time, it became an important part of the week for both of us - a mixture of both fun and serious work. He started out barely able to read, and by the end of second grade, was reading ahead of grade level.

I won't pretend that Nick's progress was solely due to my work with him. On the contrary, he had the benefit of talented, effective, and caring primary and intervention teachers at Sullivant, and they did all of the heavy lifting. But beyond the practice work we did together in these one-on-one situations, my fellow tutors and I were just ordinary folks modeling fluency with our language and a joy of learning.

Last year we brought this program to our own Beacon Elementary, and will be returning there this year as well. In addition, we're starting up a program at Hilliard Crossing Elementary. Both will take place on Wednesdays at lunch, beginning with an orientation session on 10/9, and kick-off with the kids on 10/16.

I invite you to donate one Wednesday lunch time each week through April to serve with us. The more kids we can help via these programs, the more who will have successful school careers, through high school graduation and beyond. In the coming years, we hope to expand to more of the Hilliard elementary schools.

We must break this cycle of poverty, which is perpetuated by the failure of kids to complete the education necessary to find self-sustaining jobs in our evolving economy. And they can't read to learn until they learn to read. This reading program makes a difference.

Will you help us be part of the solution?

For information on the Beacon Reading program, click here.

For information on the Crossing Reading program, click here.

Please do it soon.

One Person - One Dot

I'm a map lover. I'm not sure why exactly, but maps fascinate me.  Google Earth is the coolest app ever, in my opinion.

There are many kinds of maps, of course. Some show roads, and I still have a bunch of road maps in our car even though we use a GPS device almost exclusively these days. Others maps show terrain features, like the topographic maps available online from the US Geological Survey. On my motorcycle I have a map of Ohio that is overlaid with all the major railroad routes, because I'm also a railfan. Bet you didn't know the State of Ohio publishes such a map.

Dustin Cable of the University of Virginia recently published a map of the US that shows one dot for every person recorded in the 2010 Census. That's a lot of dots - around 300 million. Each dot is coded with a color depicting the race of the individual - Whites in blue, Blacks in green, Asians in red, Hispanics in orange, and all others in brown. It comes out looking like this:

click to enlarge

I expected this map to be shaded mostly with the grey-brown hue that Play-Doh turns into when you inevitably squish all the colors into one lump, but on this map the primary colors are still distinguishable. It's hard to miss the swath of green across the coastal South, indicating that a significant majority of the population there is African-American. Or the shift to orange, red and brown in the Southwest where Native American and Hispanic populations are prominent.

One also notices the high density in the eastern half of the country, and very low numbers of folks in the western half. Having ridden across the continent a couple of times on my Harley, I have experienced these wide open spaces firsthand. It's a beautiful thing.

So what happens when you zoom in a little closer?  Here's Ohio. 

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It's easy to pick out the big cities because of the density of dots. But also notice that each city seems to have a blue section and a green section. Let's zoom in more:

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Here's central Ohio. The red line is I-71, which seems to have become a dividing wall between the White and Black community. There are those who say that I-71 was built where it was and how it was - on top of an man-made embankment - for exactly that purpose.

How about our community?

Click to Enlarge

The blue-green line represents the approximate boundary of our school district (sorry West Point!). The yellow lines are Hilliard-Rome/Main St/Avery Rd and Roberts, purple is Cemetery Rd, and Green is Alton Darby Rd.

Perhaps the most obvious thing is that nearly all our people live in the eastern half of the school district. I suspect that a lot of people don't know that the school district stretches all the way to Darby Creek, and that Alton-Darby Rd is the midline of the district, not the western frontier. There is nearly as much land left to develop in our school district as there is land that has already been developed. This is why we need to continue to pay attention to the development policies of the leaders of the cities that fall within our district: Hilliard, Columbus and Dublin.  

Because of the stranglehold Columbus has on the regional water/sewer system, as well as the terms of the Win-Win Agreement, the way in which most of that western half develops will be controlled by the City of Columbus, and we have very little political power in that dialog. The big question mark is what will become of the Big Darby Accord - an entity whose creation was driven by the City of Columbus and joined by all the municipalities and townships that make up the Big Darby watershed in Franklin County.

What about the racial distribution in our community?  There seems to be a couple of neighborhoods with non-White concentrations?  Is something going on here?

Here is the map of Greater New York City, with Manhattan at the center:

Click to Enlarge

The clustering of racial groups in that area is striking. But is it a matter of segregation or choice?  Historically, it was the former of course, but today it's mostly a matter of choice. New York remains a city of immigrants. I still chuckle thinking of a billboard I once saw on the FDR expressway on the way to LaGuardia Airport which read: "Come to Hong Kong, where ALL the cab drivers speak English!"  But one of the cool things about going to NYC is that one can get a taste of many cultures just by riding the subway a few stops and emerging to a different neighborhood.

It's true all over the world that immigrant groups often cluster together, mostly to enjoy the company and comfort of people from a familiar culture and language. There are communities of American ex-pats all over the world. We do it too.

So I'm not especially alarmed that we have some racial clustering going on in our community. Central Ohio is also a magnet for immigrants, perhaps not on the scale of New York, Miami, LA or Seattle, but still we are a place where immigrants come, and always have been. And when they first arrive, many will seek the familiarity of neighbors from their homeland, just as did the waves of immigrants over a hundred years ago. It's usually the second and third generations that assimilate into the new country, largely because they end up in public schools, the real melting pot of American society.

There was a time when racial segregation was explicit, but thankfully those days are over. We still have challenges with economic segregation, here and everywhere in America, and we perpetuate this largely through our public school district boundaries. It may at some point call into question whether our way of organizing public schools is still good for America.

I'm glad our three high schools have similar demographics - this is not the case with all school districts in our area (the strips below are extracted from the 2011-2012 State Report Cards). 

BRADLEY - click to enlarge

DARBY - click to enlarge

DAVIDSON - click to enlarge

I hope our community remains one that enjoys cultural diversity, because that too is a learning experience for our kids - something that will serve them well as our world continues to shrink.

Getting Most Things Right

I wrote an earlier post which mentioned that Southwestern City Schools is considering the wisdom of taking on $250+ million in debt in order to capture another $200 million in funding from the State of Ohio for the purpose of refurbishing and replacing a number of their schools. It's going to be a daunting task to get voters to approve this, and here's why...

Southwestern has four high schools:

• Franklin Heights, built in 1956, with additions in 1963, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1986 (Rec Center and ERC), 1992, and 1996
• Grove City, built in 1970
• Westland, built in 1970, additions in 1971, 1976.
• Central Crossing, built 2002.

They are not the same. Here's what The Dispatch recently wrote:

Schools have been built in the district nearly every decade since the 1920s, each constructed in the design standard for its time.

Franklin Heights High School, built in 1955, is a 135,000-square-foot brick box with no air conditioning and inadequate wiring for technology. Even with six renovations and additions, the school barely handles its more than 1,200 students.

Hallways become packed when students change classes, and some students spend part of their lunch in the gym because there's no room in the cafeteria. Teachers use storage rooms and closets as office space to work individually with students.

By contrast, 6-year-old Central Crossing High School is a sprawling, 260,700-square-foot building that features security sensors at every exterior door, video projectors in some classrooms and a dozen computer labs.

Over the years, the leaders of Southwestern City Schools have allowed a great disparity to develop in the quality of their buildings. It happened at all levels, not just the high schools. There are below standard schools, like Franklin Heights, and schools which are palaces in comparison, like Central Crossing. And as I reported on the website last year, the demographics and the performance of the four high schools are strikingly different.

Grove City High School was designated Excellent by the State Board of Education, having met 12 of the 12 indicators, with an index of 101.3. Its student body is 93% white, with 14% of the kids classified as Economically Disadvantaged. 90% of the Grove City students take the ACT and receive an average score of 22. The graduation rate is 90%. Average family income is $60,000, and the average home value $138,000 (in 2000).

Franklin Heights High School is designated as in Continuous Improvement, and met only 5 of the 12 indicators. Its index rating is 86.9, and it did not meet Annual Yearly Improvement goals. The student body is 72% white with 45% of the kids classified as Economically Disadvantaged. While the average ACT score is 18.7, only 54% of the students take the test. The graduation rate is 80%. Average family income is $43,000 and the average home value is $85,000.

Central Crossing and Westland fall right in the middle.

So when it comes time to vote on a levy that would add $250 million to their community's indebtedness, it seems like you'll get one of two reactions:

1. Levies are supported most by families with kids in school. In the Franklin Heights attendence area, 45% of those families are economically disadvantaged. Overall, that part of the community has more than 10% of its families living at or below the poverty level. I don't see a lot of votes to raise taxes coming from these neighborhoods, even though this is the area that needs new schools the most.
   
2. The voters with kids in the other three high schools might decide that their school buildings are just fine and their kids are doing just fine as well. Why take on an increase in taxes when their kids aren't going to see much benefit?

As much as I have criticized the school leadership over the years, please note that it is not often about the decisions they make. As I have said many times, they are (and have been over the years) good, smart and wise people who make good decisions almost all the time. My beef is consistently about the lack of openness and the ineffective communications. The enemy is not school leadership, and certainly not the teachers and staff, but rather is those who put their selfish money motivations above the health of our schools and community. You decide who those might be...

One of the best policies our school board implemented over the past couple of decades is to build our facilities to standard plans, and to keep even our oldest schools updated and very functional. No other school district in central Ohio has three virtually identical and modern high schools. Not Dublin, not Westerville, not Pickerington, and centainly not Southwestern.

While the discussion surrounding our most recent redistricting effort was not our community's finest hour, in the end our high schools and middle schools will have similar demographics, and I'm sure will deliver similar results on the state report cards.

Southwestern City Schools has a real challenge before it. It has allowed the community to fragment, and it may be impossibly expensive to fix at this point. They need a new 6 mill operating levy just to stay solvent - and that's after laying off 100 teachers plus 150 other staff in 2006.

We should be very thankful our school board had the wisdom to avoid this bear trap.

Punishing Genius

Just for the record, I think the punishment given to Davidson senior Kyle Garchar for the now famous "WE SUCK" prank was a bit overboard. I for one am glad that we have kids with these kinds of smarts in our District. Note that both of our kids graduated from Darby. This is funny in the same way it was funny that MIT students figured out a way to make an MIT balloon pop up at mid-field during halftime of the Harvard-Yale game a few years back.

Does that mean young Mr. Garchar and his helpers should not be punished at all?

Certainly not. But the punishment needs to fit the injury and the intent.

Maybe you could sentence him to serve as a Darby cheerleader for a Darby home game. Or maybe as waterboy. Something faintly humiliating, but in the same spirit of fun.

That being said, my assessment is based on the assumption that this was a practical joke between student bodies that mutually respect each other as equals. However, if the intent by Mr. Garchar was to maliciously paint the Darby community as inferior to those from Davidson, then we need to pay attention.

Wrong Side of the Tracks, Part IV

This is the fourth in a series of posts concerning the ethnic imbalance in our schools. The first of the series can be found here.

As their term ended in June, the US Supreme Court released a number of decisions. If you have been listening to the news of the past couple of weeks, you know that an unusual number of those decisions were 5-4, very much along philosophical lines. There has been much concern expressed in the mainstream media that this particular Court is embarking on an effort to reverse many cases which define the liberal position in America. One of those was the Brown vs Board of Education decision which ordered the desegregation of public schools in America.

This year, the case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 was brought before the Supreme Court, and in one of those 5-4 votes, the Court decided that discrimination on the basis of race, even when intention is to promote racial balance, is inappropriate. Since this decision was announced, every single news report I've seen or heard has said that this decision reversed Brown.

I'm not a lawyer, so I won't pretend to say whether this is true or not. But as I have found to be the case so many times, you have to dig past what the press and the politicians are saying and get to the unadulterated facts if you want the truth. It's not hard at all to get on the website for the US Supreme Court and read the text of their decisions. Here is the opinion for this case.

If you have read the rest of this series, you know that I believe that Hilliard Schools are becoming increasingly segregated, and that there is more to it than just the luck of the draw based on where your home is located. So in listening to what the mainstream media was saying about this case, I thought that those who support this resegregation had won the day.

But Justice Kennedy said something interesting in his concurring opinion:

School authorities concerned that their student bodies' racial composition interfere with offering an equal education opportunity to all are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion based solely on a systematic, individual typing by race. Such measures may include the strategic site selection of new schools, drawing attendance zones with general recognition of neighborhood demographics, allocating resources for special programs, recruiting students and facilty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance and other statistics by race.

Therefore, as I read it from a layman's perspective, the option remains open to adjust attendance boundaries as long as there is no intent to target individuals.

I understand how difficult it is to change attendance zone for our schools, having served on the Redistricting Committee this last time around. But I also heard enough folks on that Committee use language such as "those people" and "they live there because they want to" to know that racism and elitism exists in our community.

The education we give our kids isn't just what they learn from their teachers in the classrooms, it's also those things they see us parents do and say as members of a community.

The battle to end discrimination in America is NOT over. If anything, we're regressing as new waves of immigrants pour in.

Wrong Side of the Tracks, Part III

This is the third in a series of posts concerning the ethnic imbalance in our schools. The first of the series can be found here.

Additional community comments about the redistricting, copied without corrections:

• I could send my children to the district seven miles to the south and have them educated with the same types of students that will be at Crossing with the new proposal for much less.
• Under Option A for the redistricting for the high school, Ballantrae residents would be sent to Darby High School, from what I understand. I am very much AGAINST this proposal. One of the reasons I chose Ballantrae was for Davidson High School. Many, many other Ballantrae residents feel the same way.
• I am writing to voice my disapproval of where the Hyde Park subdivision is slated to go to school next year. It is a school with test scores that have dropped in every major area except 4th grade writing for the past three years. I am afraid that not only would I move to another area of Hilliard with better schools, I would have a fairly difficult time selling it due to the elementary school to which children in that area would go.
• Here is my concern: I left the Columbus Public School District to pay more taxes for better schools. I live in the city of Hilliard proper and now we are going to be redistricted to an elementary school with continually declining test scores and a population taht reminds me a great deal of Columbus/Southwestern City Schools. ( live in Hyde Park, being sent to Crossing on all three maps). I am very disappointed in the way this is turing out. Hyde Park has continuously supported school issues and bond issues and this is the way we are considered?
• I strongly encourage the Board of Education members to carefully consider the drawing of the zones that are in the central and southern portions of our district to distribute the share of rentals throughout Scioto Darby, JW Reason, Beacon, Hilliard Crossing, Darby Creek, etc. so that they are not concentrated in two or three schools
• Our major concern as residents of Ballantrae, is the major home investment we made for our children to attend Davidson High School. The property taxes are huge ($10,000 - $20,000 per year). We have been willing to pay and vote "yes" on school issues twice, since we moved here. This has increased our taxes each time. The possibility of being moved to Darby is not acceptable for many reasons. 1.) Many Ballantrae residents formerly resided in Carrington, Britton Farms, and River Landings subdivisions. These are not new Hilliard residents. We are residents who have been in the district for many years. The criteria of "new neighborhood" should not apply here if the board is really being fair. 2.)The construction on Cosgray and Hayden Run will make the next 4 years a nightmare for travel to Darby and Heritage. We have already suffered through the Avery Rd./Hayden Run Rd. 9 month shutdown. This would continue the nightmare for our neighborhood. 3.) The word is out that the board will vote on Option A. The "people in the know" as we shall call them, will only fuel the argument that the board and district adminstrators really are not listening to community input. Rather they are only going through the motions, if Option A is indeed the one accepted by the board. The impact of this decision on the school community will be huge. Looking to the north in Dublin, their school board understands that you don't bite the community hand that feeds you. Their new school openings offered some choice and gave voters(parents) a true measure of respect and value. This is not the case with this situation. The lack of respect will be interpreted as " the board and adminstrators really don't care what you think or want - just keep paying". Unfortunately, this will ultimately alienate the people who have been your biggest backers.(i.e. percentage of yes votes in the last 2 school campaigns). Politically, for the long term financial stability of the district, this would not be a prudent decision. This will turn a 80% - 20% yes vote into a 80 - 20 no vote on future voting. With school issues running close, that could and would change the outcome of those school issues. People in Ballantrae vote. People in Ballantrae will opt for different choices for their children's education outside the Hilliard City Schools. People in Ballantrae will not sit quietly and let the board dictate a change that the people (voters, parents) are vehemently against. The neighborhood emails are flying, the community is organizing. What a shame that a short sighted decision could turn into a long term political nightmare for the district. One that has enjoyed exceptional support from this neighborhood. 4.) While understanding that redistricting is never easy, this is not the same old Hilliard of even 10 years ago. Parents and community expect a different level of service and accountability for their tax dollars.If you want high levels of support from the community, there must be a high level of respect from the board and district adminstrators. If that happens, our children can be the true beneficiaries.
• Sending the students from Hyde Park to Crossing would be a double whammy for those of us who live here. Not only would it take us away from the children we see everyday, it would send us to a school that has below-district averages on the state standardized tests. In the past, this development has supported the schools in every issue it has faced. I am afraid that if one of the primary plans are used that send our kids to Crossing, this support will be lost. Who would buy a house in an area with subpar schools? There is no doubt that our house values would decrease.
• Our family and many neighbors are adamantly opposed to "Option A" for High School/Middle School. My wife and I are proud Hilliard graduates. Our family recently moved back to the Columbus area after being in Baltimore, MD for many years. We had many friends & co-workers tell us to avoid Hilliard City Schools because the district had changed for the worse over the past several years. We looked at Arlington and Dublin schools, but we decided on Hilliard City Schools and the Ballantrae subdivision, mainly due to the new elementary school (Washington) and the notion our children would go to Davidson H.S. I can't even begin to imagine our children riding in their bus past Davidson H.S. everyday to get to Darby H.S. I would rather send my children to private school and vote no on all future Hilliard school levies.
• Some of the redistricting plans have MANY condo and apt. areas slated for the same school.ie:Hilliard Crossing may be 8/10 from apt. and condo.I KNOW that this pop. of students is more transient and generally have parents of lower educational/income levels.Is it really the best choice for them to be mostly put in the same school??Is it the best choice for all of Hilliard?Spread out that population to several schools! That is what is in the best interest of all the children of Hilliard!
• I sincerely hope that the Hilliard Board of Education will insure that all three Hilliard high schools will be treated fairly in regard to socioeconmically disadvanteged families. Please insure that lower income housing is spread equally among the three high schools. We already have a community perspective with the current two high schools as the "haves" and "have nots." Please do your best to distribute the concerns evenly. Research shows that the students who do the best academically come from families with higher socail economic status. While there are many good things that come from diversity, there are concerns as well. The concerns are for each and every student to receive the best education possible, staff understanding/support/development and community education. Please divide the load to help prevent many negative things that will occur if you do not.
• I had hoped that the board would use redisticting as an opportunity to create diversity in all our schools. I believe that exposure to diversity creates life-long lessons that academics can not, but I believe that it is also unfair for schools with significant cultural and socio-economic diversity to be held to the same standards without additional assistance for our teachers.

It is encouraging for me to see some community members expressing the belief that we need to use the opportunity of this redistricting effort to rebalance so that each individual school has a socioeconomic profile which matches the community at large. I also respect the views of those who say they don't want to see this kind of rebalancing take place.

But I have little respect for those who want to define some schools as enclaves for the affluent and predominately white neighborhoods in the district, but mask their true feelings by making the discussion be about traffic and transportation issues.

Next post on this subject

Wrong Side of the Tracks, Part II

This post is a continuation of an earlier discussion about the potential for cultural imbalance in our school system.

The work of the Redistricting Team is all but completed, and the various options are now being presented to the public for their examination and input. The school district has created a mechanism through its website for community members to voice comments and suggestions, and as of March 12, there have been 271 entries posted.

There is an interesting tone to several of the comments from residents of Heritage Lakes, the upscale golf course community. These folks are saying that they want their opinions heeded because they pay what they believe are some of the highest taxes in Hilliard (I think that distinction may actually go to some of the homeowners in Norwich and Brown township).

• "It is also a fact that we pay some of the very highest in property/school tax of any other single subdivision in Hilliard. This is just a fact. I would like to think that when we pay well above what other homeowners pay for our children to go to a Hilliard city school that our input is taken seriously. It is our very high school taxes that usually cover not just our children but other children as well. "
• "Based on the structure of our neighborhood and taxes we pay, we are asking to stay at Alton Darby"
• "We moved from ... to Heritage Lakes 1 year ago to get my son into a better school. Now with the chances of having him moved into another school, we are faced with the possibility of having to move again. If we get redistriced to Horizon or some of the other low‑income-family schools, we will move out of Hilliard all together. It is completely unfair that we could be redistricted to a school where 80% of the families there only pay $1000 worth of taxes a year because they either live in condos or low income housing. We moved to one of the higher end neighborhoods and pay around $5000 taxes so that we would be in the a better school acedemically (sic), socially and economically. If I am going to pay that much in taxes and get assigned to a poor school, than I might as well pay my taxes to Upper Arlington, Grandview or Dublin and be in a good school for my money."
• "Please also consider the taxes Heritage Lakes pays, we are asking to stay at Alton Darby."

Other are coming right out and saying that they know certain schools have a larger proportion of minority students, and they don't want their kids to go there:

• "Currently, it seems that the entire Willowbend apartments are made up on non-english speaking Somolians. The Somolians then make up, what seems like at least half of the classrooms. As I and other parents have experienced, the teachers are forced to spend the majority of their time explaining to the non-english speaking Somolian parents how to do simple things like fill out paperwork. For example, on back to school night, that's all the teachers were able to do. They did not get the time to talk to any other parents. As well, my daughter had informed me that all of her teachers were forced to spend all extra classroom time w/ those students. She therefore received very little help in math (an area she struggled with) and now in 6th grade, we have been forced to pay for an outside tutor. I know that Hilliard has no control of those developments, which are Columbus but Hillard schools. ..so all that I am asking is that the Hilliard City School District bus at least half of those students to other schools. They need to split them up more and make it more fair to not only the Horizon students but the teachers there as well! I know many parents from other Hilliard elementary schools and they do not have this problem. It's just not fair any way you look at it that it be so heavily loaded onto one school. We find it frustrating at times that we pay $5,000 a year in taxes so that our kids could go to a good school but yet, they are not really benefitting from it due to this issue"
• "There is just absolutely no way that the following options are fair: C, E, F & G. The reason I say that is because you are then sending both of the most heavily weighted section eight apartment complexes together. ..that being Willow Bend Townhomes and Bayside Commons. In no way shape or form will that be fair to the kids and parents who pay $4,000+ yearly taxes. If that happens, both Davidson and Darby will be promiently white and the New HS and Memorial will be extremely heavily loaded with the Somolian population in which most don't speak English. As it is now (my kids have attended school w/ Willow Bend for some time)...teachers are spending 90% of their time with those students!! And then you are going to add yet another Section Eight apartment complex!!?? That will also mean that the new HS will then be where 99% of the crime will be of the three high schools...kind of like Darby vs. Davidson today."

As much as we would like to think of our community as either a homogenous population, or one of harmonious diversity, it is neither. The imagery is less that of a melting pot than it is a bucket of marbles -- together in the same place, but not really blending.

Our community leaders cannot allow this kind of socioeconomic stratification to occur in our schools. We must be willing to transport kids as necessary to keep a similar socioeconomic profile across all of our buildings. The land area of our school district is small enough that the worst-case busing scenarios are still pretty reasonable. In fact, most of the time spent on bus routes is in the winding through developments, not the transit time on major arteries. In our case, we drove our kids to and from Darby High School every day because the drive was about 10 minutes while the bus ride through all the developments was nearly an hour!

The good thing is that this conversation is out in the open now.

To see additional comments made to the school board, click here

The Wrong Side of the Tracks?

We like to think that discrimination no longer exists in America, but it may actually be getting worse.

Many of us have forgotten that in 1977, Federal District Court Judge Robert Duncan ruled in the case of Penick v. The Columbus Board of Education that Columbus schools were indeed inappropriately segregated, and as a result, ordered that a busing program be implemented to rebalance the racial mix of the Columbus schools. That ruling resulted in a 'white flight' to the suburbs, including Hilliard. Today, the Columbus schools are Blacker and poorer than ever before.

It may be illegal to discriminate based on race, creed, color, and so on, but our society absolutely condones discrimination based on economic status. To live in a neighborhood of expensive houses, you need to be wealthy. Municipalities enact zoning regulations which ensure that low-priced houses are kept out of the neighborhoods of luxury homes.

Things are even more complex in our community, where the school district serves people who live in many municipalities, including the Cities of Hilliard, Columbus and Dublin, as well as several townships. Within the boundaries of Columbus, many high density and multifamily communities have been built, a number of which are occupied by minority and immigrant families with children.

As a result, the various schools in our district have varying minority and low-income populations. In particular, there are twice as many minority students at Darby High School than at Davidson. At the elementary levels, the population of minority students is significantly higher at Horizon, Beacon and Norwich than at other schools such as Brown, Britton and Ridgewood.

A redistricting effort is underway right now, and I am thankful to be a part of it. There has been a discussion as to the degree that ethnic balance have priority over logistics (i.e. is it okay to bus kids past one school to another to achieve this balance)?

What do you think?

Go here to read the second part of this discussion.