School Board Update
November 29, 2005
Dear South End neighbors,
The past two Tuesday evenings, the school board held special hearings at the high school and then at the Lawrence Barnes Elementary School to take public comments on a consolidation proposal from the district administration. The most controversial part of this plan is that the Barnes school be converted to headquarters for our administration, early childhood programs, and alternative high schools. This would allow us to sell the buildings that currently house those programs – the Taft building on S. Williams and Ira Allen on Colchester Ave. At the same time, the proposal would have us redistrict Barnes kids to Champlain, Smith and Edmunds towards the goal of equalizing the percentage of kids who qualify for free and reduced lunch (a measure of poverty) at no more than fifty percent in every school in the district. Barnes and Wheeler are presently at around ninety-five percent, while the rest of our schools range between thirty-five and forty-seven percent. This proposal, and a message board on which you can post comments, are located at www.bsdvt.org. Click on “school board” and you will find the links. I want to address two parts of the plan somewhat separately in this update: consolidation (financial) and socio-economic integration (philosophical).
The idea to reduce from six to five elementary schools makes sense from the perspective of enrollment and finances (both are diminishing), but mostly what we heard from Old North End residents and others was a lot of anger about the idea. The Free Press article that covered the event last week summed up the situation well – a lot of voices opposed to closure, and a few who were encouraged by our plans for socio-economic integration
I have been thinking a great deal about the comments. The most moving testimony came from parents who love the school deeply, feel powerless in the face of what they perceive as imminent Board action, and angry at the prospect of being told what is best for their children. Many of these people view the ‘buzzword’ of socio-economic integration as a cover for class warfare. The idea of sending their kids out of the neighborhood to give them more opportunities feels like an insulting slap in the face. They have legitimate concerns about transportation – many parents at Barnes have no cars, and can not imagine how they will deal with the need to pick up a sick child, get to a parent-teacher conference, or deliver a child who has overslept and missed the bus. On the opposite side of the spectrum were a very few brave souls who stood up to say they thought that poverty-saturated schools are a disservice to children that needs to be remedied. Among these were a devoted long-time teacher at Barnes, and a behavioral specialist from Barnes and now Hunt. Both were eloquent, and emotional, in urging us to integrate their young students into classes with ‘role models’ where they can be absorbed in a school culture that includes a healthy mix of college-bound aspirants. The concept of ‘peer modeling’ is written about in academic journals as an abstract principle, but Ann Tewksbury described it in a visceral way – she reported sending one of her Barnes students to another school for an afternoon just to experience a classroom in which racial epithets were not used, and behavioral disturbances were rare. The behavioral specialist from Hunt tearfully related his experience trying to blend kids who had never crossed Pearl Street into a diverse middle school, where the jump in academic expectations was much greater than for kids coming from Flynn and Smith.
So, what do we do? First, it is important to understand why the administration has proposed the present plan. Barnes is our smallest (145 students) elementary school, and it would make a great location for our district headquarters, preschool program and other community functions. H.O. Wheeler is three blocks away, which means that there would still be an elementary school in the neighborhood if Barnes is shifted to other functions. Some people suggest we consolidate at Champlain, Edmunds, Smith or Flynn instead, but it would be a lot harder for us to absorb much larger numbers of kids (those schools have between 223 and 331 students each) into the other schools, and most of those schools would make isolated spots for Board meetings and the other programs the District needs to relocate if it sells Taft and Ira Allen (something about which nearly everyone agrees).
While some believe that the board is trying to balance our budget at the expense of the Old North End, I see this situation in a very different light – it would be great to make lemonade out of lemons with a plan that increases academic success and high school graduation rates for our students now at Barnes and Wheeler at the same time that we stabilize our gloomy financial problems. Transportation issues seem much more easily resolvable to me than the problems that arise from poverty-saturation.
The reason I believe in the possibility of lemonade is because of what I have learned about the benefits of socioeconomic integration from teachers and principals here, and in articles I have read including these:
http://www.asbj.com/2002/10/1002coverstory.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42355-2002Mar17
http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/economicschoolintegration.pdf
While these articles all stress the steep improvement in success of students from low-income families when they attend “heterogeneous” schools, the districts that have implemented the concept (including San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass.) have used different means to get there. The idea of a community task force has been floated recently, and it seems to me that how Burlington achieves socio-economic integration among the elementary students in our district with minimal distress and maximum achievement is a great subject for that kind of group. Working together, parents, administrators, teachers, board members, etc. should be able to think through all the potential problems and solve a lot of them, and I think the Board will support that idea.
The overall mission of the task force will be a more contentious question because some people want a really diverse group to weigh in on whether Barnes remains an elementary school or not. Right now I feel like the creativity of a task force could be great at generating solutions to districting and transportation issues that arise as a result of pursuing socio-economic integration, but I’m not sure I see the point on the question of whether we still need six elementary schools, and if not which one should go. Closing a school is the most difficult thing a School Board ever has to do (Burlington has closed three elementary schools in the hill section and one in the South End since 1966 and all of those closings were bitterly opposed). If the Board doesn’t believe in the merits of the plan strongly enough to take the heat on consolidation, it shouldn’t try to get other people to take the heat instead. I can’t even imagine the political nightmare of trying to decide who could serve on a task force that was asked to make that decision, and then the pressure those members would receive.
Given the obvious target that Barnes is for consolidation, I worry that if we do hang on to it this year, it will only be a temporary stay given that our enrollments keep dropping along with federal and state funding, and expenses like energy and health care keep rising. People will be just as upset if we go through this all again next year. In the meantime, the open question leaves teachers and staff anxious about the future. And there are plenty of candidates for places to spend the more than $450,000.00 per year we would save on an ongoing basis (a subject for another update). This position is not going to be popular with a lot of people who are very upset right now, but I am trying my best to approach these emotional issues rationally. This is a very tough year to be a new school board member, and an even tougher year to be a Barnes parent. I do empathize.
I would love to hear your thoughts on these complicated issues, either on the district message board, at our next hearing, or at my e-mail address.
Amy Werbel
Ward 5 School Commissioner
awerbel@bsdvt.org