Now the students parents from more affluent schools are protesting because they want to keep going to schools with higher test scores & higher avg income levels. Basically the rich are upset that they cannot beat the system by strategically buying in neighborhoods where they can ensure their chldren can go to the most prestigious public schools. Tom Tate & the rest of the schoool board ate ensuring all children receive an adequate education regardless of their socio-economic status. Any complaining or sense of entitlement for preferential treatment sould fall on deaf ears. Everyone desrves the same uality of education regardless of where they live or their status
Emotions complicate equations behind student reassignment plan
By Ann Doss Helms
ahelms@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Sunday, Sep. 20, 2009
Myers Park/East Meck
1. Reassign students who live in the Cotswold Elementary zone, who now attend Alexander Graham Middle and Myers Park High, to McClintock Middle and East Meck High.
2. Move IB magnet students who live in the Ardrey Kell and South Meck zones to East Meck, and those who live in the Waddell and Olympic zones to Harding. All of those students currently attend Myers Park, which has 556 IB magnet students. East has 437.
3. Move all of Myers Park's IB magnet students except those who live in the Myers Park attendance zone to East Meck.
4. Eliminate Myers Park's IB program and move all magnet students to East Meck.
5. Postpone action until 2011-12, which would allow the board to review student-assignment principles after the November election.
6. Postpone action indefinitely and wait for a new high school to relieve Myers Park crowding. Such a school is a low priority in a long-range plan stalled by a shortage of construction money.
Myers Park
Students: 2,955.
Poverty: 24 percent.
Race: 59 percent white, 24 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic.
Pass rate on state exams: 84 percent.
Graduation rate: 80 percent.
Average SAT: 1691.
East Meck
Students: 2,085 this year, about 1,500 projected 2010.
Poverty: 49 percent.
Race: 49 percent black, 27 percent white, 16 percent Hispanic.
Pass rate on state exams: 75 percent.
Graduation rate: 64 percent.
Average SAT: 1458.
Some of the city's most fiercely committed public-school families are battling over a plan to move about 200 students. Each side says CMS risks toppling years of work to preserve fragile schools, alienating the very people who could save Charlotte from the fate of cities that have abandoned public education.
School board members, buried under e-mails, say the angst and fury from some of Charlotte's most prestigious neighborhoods threatens to eclipse even the months-long strife this year over boundaries for a new Mint Hill high school.
"Speaking for all students, we are not willing to lose any more teachers or AP courses," said 15-year-old Radhika Kothadia, one of two International Baccalaureate students who spoke at this week's community meeting. A shrunken East Meck "will be nowhere near as great as it is today," she said.
Some Cotswold families use terms like "war zone" to talk about East Meck and McClintock, and swap tales of neighbors trying to sell their houses before property values plunge. East Meck folks wonder how much race shapes those fears.
"Stability" has become a rallying cry, with politicians and families saying CMS sabotages itself with constant change. But growth and stability are incompatible, and this controversy began with plans for a new high school in booming Mint Hill.
A drawn-out battle over those boundaries left East dropping from almost 2,100 students this year to around 1,500 next year.
Tom Tate, who represents East Meck's voting district, asked the board to consider moving students in from Myers Park, and got unanimous support to move forward. Faced with the outcry that followed, many board members have since wavered, suggesting they wait to take a more in-depth look at student assignment after the election.
Tipping points
CMS doesn't assign students explicitly to balance poverty, although diversity is one factor the board can consider. Since court-ordered desegregation ended in 2002, the number of schools with very few middle-class or white students has surged.
Some that were racially and economically mixed at that time have tipped. Prime example: McClintock Middle, which had roughly equal numbers of white and black, poor and non-poor students in 2002. Since then it has lost about 250 students, poverty has risen to around 75 percent and white students make up only 13 percent of enrollment.
That flight, most agree, was accelerated by a former principal who clashed with parent leaders. The principal's job has changed hands four times in the ensuing six years. Many parents, current board members and candidates say no matter what happens with boundaries, CMS must do more to revive McClintock.
Radhika and her friend Becky Rodriguez, both sophomores, came to East knowing no one. They say they've found a friendly school with teachers who care and racial diversity in the most challenging courses.
The newly organized East Meck Action Community - made up of parents, teachers, alumni and neighbors without kids in public schools - is arguing that CMS endangers the east side and its own future if it lets East Meck bleed students and staff. They're asking the school board to move Cotswold to East, saying it will help both schools.
"This is a critical time for both East Mecklenburg and Myers Park," Trosch said. "If you lose the inner-ring schools, and then you lose the middle-ring schools, it's only a matter of time before you lose the outer-ring schools."
Fighting flight
Cotswold families say reassigning them will only accelerate flight. In the mid-1990s, they say, CMS redrew lines that left Cotswold Elementary with about 60 percent poverty.
"People ran from this school like it was on fire," Weddington recalls. But some parents in the surrounding middle-class neighborhoods knocked on doors and held recruitment parties, gradually winning over neighbors. Strong principals and teachers restored confidence, they say, as did the school board's 2002 decision to send the Cotswold zone to Alexander Graham and Myers Park.
Cotswold's poverty level was 46 percent last year, and the school boasts a cadre of neighborhood parents who volunteer even after their children move up. Students from the impoverished Grier Heights neighborhood get extra support because of that involvement, they say.
