West Hartford Schools, The State, And Social Engineering

It's baaaaack.... oh yes, the issue of racial imbalance. You didn't really think that the State would go away on that issue, did you? Just when the West Hartford community could come together and not be divided over a budget referendum, we get race thrown at us from the State and its social engineering mandates.

In a move to somehow make more white students attend Smith School and Charter Oak Academy of Global Studies, school officials are considering demolishing the 80-year-old Charter Oak school and constructing a new, bigger Charter Oak at the cost of $45 million dollars!

Are they nuts? Who will pay for this? Shouldn't we be more concerned with the content of our curriculum so ALL kids can benefit rather than moving kids around like chess pieces in order to make sure the crayon box is better color co-ordinated?

The state notified West Hartford last month that Charter Oak and the Smith School of Science, Math and Technology — two neighborhood schools in the southeastern part of town with intra-district magnet programs — have again been identified as racially unbalanced. Under state law, that occurs when the proportion of minority children in the school is more than 25 percentage points above or below the district's average. In West Hartford, 36 percent of elementary students are minority.

This state mandate is well meaning, but stupid. What they ought to be focused on is whether ALL children in the same school district are receiving a quality education, not what color or ethnicity or socio-economic status the children sitting next to one another is in any given classroom.

Though facing pressure from the state, school officials say they consider it "a moral obligation" to address the issue and have outlined preliminary options, including reviewing the schools' magnet themes, changing the magnet lottery process and developing a short-term plan to increase magnet seats.

But the loftiest, long-term idea is erecting a $45 million "premier facility," in the words of incoming superintendent Karen List, that would seat up to 550 students and feature an academically rigorous International Baccalaureate program that the school has already begun to implement. The hope is that students from Duffy, Bugbee and other elementary schools would be drawn to the school voluntarily.

Moral obligation? The moral obligation here is to be color blind and offer the best education to EVERY child in town no matter where they live and go to school! Should we now consider busing kids all over town, and taking the time and expense to do that just to satisfy some arbitrary State mandated numbers? This law, no doubt, is designed to invoke cries of racism that really does not exist in our already incredibly diverse school system. Families from the any given side of town may not be interested in attending Smith or Charter Oak, and vice versa, not because of a higher or lower minority ratio, but because of many other factors. Proximity to home is a big one.

Instead of wasting tens of millions of dollars on building a new school, how about West Hartford creates its own voucher program such that any child can go to any public school in town (or does that ability exist already)? It seems that families will still opt for neighborhood schools, because we understand that race is not the issue; school pride is. Charter Oak and Smith families love their neighborhood school, and they full well know that any child of any background is welcome there, as they are in any West Hartford School. Can the State honestly ignore that factor over race? Please, let's not buy into the notion that West Hartford is somehow a community of racists, and let's not allow the State to somehow infer that we are, especially since several factors dictate where people buy homes and send their kids to school in our town.

Harry Captain's comments at last night's board of education meeting was spot on as he pointedly asked, (perhaps not verbatim) "What is the minority ratio of the Hartford Magnet School? do we know?" Where is the State on that one?

And why isn't the State doing more to help us financially, or with other resources, to close the achievement gap that our system is experiencing? No, instead they continue to shove more mandates and more problems at us to fix at our own expense.

In drawing up a new action plan, West Hartford school officials acknowledge that a decade long effort to desegregate Charter Oak and Smith has failed.

This school year, children identified as black, Hispanic or Asian make up 81 percent of Charter Oak's student body and 70 percent of the Smith population.

While the vast majority of magnet students were white 10 years ago, now three out of four magnet students at Charter Oak — and two out of three at Smith — are minority.

Even as some neighborhood families from the southeast move to wealthier sections of town, parents sign up their children as magnet students so they can return to Charter Oak and Smith, places viewed as more welcoming of diversity.

School officials say the lack of magnet seats is another reason behind the persistent imbalance. Currently, Charter Oak has space for 361 students, largely neighborhood children.

A bigger Charter Oak, they envision, would house Charter Oak neighborhood students, some from Smith and 150 to 250 magnet students. The freed-up space at Smith would then allow that school to accommodate more magnet students.

At least the Mayor has a sense of reality, when the notion of who will pay for new construction arises.

Mayor Scott Slifka said balancing the racial and socioeconomic makeup at the schools could be "one of the more defining issues of our time" in West Hartford. Building a school, however, won't happen "in the foreseeable future," he said.

"One of the areas we cannot afford to pursue at this time is construction of anything, especially something of that size and scope," Slifka said.

But of course proponents are already crying and looking to get federal money for this foray into social engineering.

The latest racial balancing efforts have involved town officials and state legislators, some of whom have met with U.S. Rep. John Larson, D-1st District, in recent weeks to talk generally about their options. A spokeswoman for Larson declined to comment Monday on whether the congressman would be open to exploring federal funding for a school.

It would seem that so much more could be done with $45 million dollars, especially in education. Building a new school and shuffling kids around seems to be the least effective way to spend that kind of money. Putting that kind of money into reading programs, and making technology available to ALL kids, or perhaps finding more effective programs to close achievement gaps would go a much longer way than spending it on bricks or buses. Expanding outreach and parent involvement is also something to consider. We need to forget geography and stop thinking about re-arranging the deck chairs on a ship that just needs to concentrate on the needs of ALL of the passengers.