Neighborhood Schools — or Resegregation?

The Charlotte Observer’s series, “Deciding Desegregation,” probed the potential costs of a lawsuit to end desegregation efforts in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. In the aftermath of a landmark 1970 ruling by U.S. District Judge James McMillan (affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1971), Charlotte had come to be considered “the city that made busing work.” In the late 1990s, however, white parents sued to reopen the case.

In this series, reporters Debbie Cenziper, Ted Mellnick, Celeste Smith, Jim Morrill, and Jennifer Rothacker used computer analysis, historical research, and the personal accounts of community members to create a comprehensive, engaging journalistic triumph that one judge, a journalism professor, deemed “a model.” The stories struck a nerve, drawing over 2,500 phone calls and widespread reaction in the community. The article reprinted here, the third in the series, explores the possible consequences of replacing a desegregated system with “neighborhood schools,” where children would attend the nearest school, regardless of race or income.

 

The most daunting challenge of neighborhood schools — more than an increase in one-race classrooms — could be inner-city campuses packed with Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s poorest children.

If busing and other strategies that mix black and white children end, and all students are assigned to their nearest schools, the inner city would be home to almost every high-poverty school in the district, an Observer computer simulation shows.

And 13 schools would have a student poverty rate substantially higher than any Charlotte-Mecklenburg school has now. That’s because so many poor children — now spread among many schools — would be concentrated on so few campuses.

Poor children aren’t necessarily bad students. But educators say they often come to class hungry, tired, or ill-prepared, with social problems that can hinder their learning and overwhelm teachers.

Among the many worries: Curriculum is often less advanced in impoverished schools; teachers are harder to attract and keep; parent support is inconsistent. Underprivileged kids often have fewer college-bound peers as role models.

And isolating poor children means that at outlying schools, kids who are better off have less interaction with children from neighborhoods unlike theirs.

Veteran teacher Ann Grier fears another impact. It’s about passing hope and high expectations to disadvantaged children, and drawing them out of their neighborhoods to see what the community has to offer.

In her classroom of fifth-graders at Sharon Elementary, Grier drills: “If you can believe it, you can do what?”

Jamarr Robinson wants to become a biologist. He’s bused to Sharon from Charlotte’s west side, and sits next to middle- and upper-income kids whose parents consider college an education staple. He shifts from foot to foot and answers. “You can achieve it.”

African American school board member George Dunlap attended an integrated school in the 1970s, and sums up Grier’s concern like this: “If poor kids don’t see that there’s a better way, or there’s a better life, if everybody looks like them and it’s hard to see that world outside of theirs . . . for the kid who is really distressed about that, where’s the hope?”

The parents and community leaders pursuing neighborhood schools counter that Charlotte will find the money to support impoverished campuses with essentials such as preschool, smaller classes, parenting and adult literacy classes, higher teacher salaries that attract top-quality educators.

They say bringing additional resources to some of the district’s neediest students will be more effective than busing kids out of their neighborhoods, and maybe even lowering their self-esteem by sending them to schools with children who have more.

Many experts say it’s too soon to tell whether neighborhood assignments in systems that used to bus students can provide better schools for all children. School systems in a growing number of cities, including Denver and Cleveland, have moved away from desegregation practices, but it will take years to measure the effects.

John Lassiter, Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board vice chairperson, expects all children to benefit if busing for desegregation ends. Often, he said, there’s a fear that disadvantaged students sometimes slow teachers down and hold classes back.

“If you have a school where a significant number of children aren’t reading on grade level and you’re trying to get through American history, how do you do that?” Lassiter said. “You certainly need to figure out how to get those children on par with all children within the system, and simply transporting them somewhere else doesn’t have any [instructional benefit].”

Bill McCoy, director of the Urban Institute at UNC Charlotte, said high-poverty schools have been less of a concern in Charlotte than in other urban communities because desegregation has spread poor children among many campuses. Two-thirds of the county’s poor children are African American.

McCoy predicts high-poverty schools will need more resources than other schools — equal resources won’t be enough. And he said the community must be willing to spend the money. National studies show high-poverty schools tend to have more dropouts, less success preparing students for college, fewer high-level courses. Students are less likely to complete high school on time, and more likely to live in poverty later in life.

“It can be addressed, but to be addressed, it means you put substantially more money into one of those schools than you in the schools out on Providence Road somewhere,” McCoy said. “This largely depends on public will to do things for people who are not very well represented, generally speaking, and who don’t come together and voice demands, generally speaking, and who probably have low expectations of their kids.

“We would have to move to a level of looking at that problem that the community has never moved to yet.”

 

Families on the Edge

Charlotte-Mecklenburg struggles with some impoverished schools now. Some campuses lost racial balance when the school board in the early 1990s stopped busing thousands of students to schools far beyond their neighborhoods. Concentrations of poverty on some campuses inched upward.

Among the 425 children at Westerly Hills Elementary on Mecklenburg’s western edge, 350 show up in the cafeteria before class each morning for a free breakfast. Money is always at issue. Principal Joan Newman wants to take her kids to Raleigh or maybe on an out-of-state field trip — many have never stepped beyond the borders of Mecklenburg County. But she doesn’t have the money to pay for gas for the school bus.

And she doesn’t want to ask parents to chip in. “They are already on the edge when it comes to having the money to meet the needs of their families,” Newman said. “They don’t have the extra things for PTAs or field trips and all the other things that make school important.”

Under a neighborhood schools scenario The Observer produced, at least 27 campuses would have student poverty rates of 16 percent or more — high compared to schools now. More than 18,000 students could attend a high-poverty school, almost 6,000 more than today.

There wouldn’t be a large leap in the number of high-poverty schools, but concentrations of poor children on some campuses would increase sharply. Elizabeth Traditional Elementary, for example, would have the highest poverty rate in the county under neighborhood schools — growing from 9 percent to almost 50 percent. Druid Hills Elementary has the highest school poverty rate today, 27 percent. Neighborhood schools would push it to 34 percent. The percentage of poor children at Spaugh Middle would double; at Piedmont Middle, it would almost quadruple. One in four students at Harding High school would be poor under The Observer’s study, compared to one in ten today.

The simulation uses the federal government’s poverty level, currently an annual income below $16,276 for a family of four. These poverty rates are lower than the measure of school poverty that school officials use: the number of students who qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch. More students qualify for the lunch program because its income limit is significantly higher.

 

Teacher Turnover an Issue

The concentrations of poor students worry school board chairperson Arthur Griffin. “America has decided that [subsidized-housing communities like Chicago’s] Cabrini Green and [Charlotte’s] Earle Village were not a good idea because you put too high a concentration of families in one place,” he said.

“Poverty doesn’t mean you’re poor. Poverty means all the attendant problems that come with it. You’re more likely to have experienced substance abuse somewhere. You’re more likely to have low birthweight experience somewhere. You’re more likely to have experienced a single-parent family. You’re more likely if you’re concentrated to be in a classroom with 80 percent of the kids just like you.”

Impoverished schools, including those in Charlotte, often have trouble attracting and keeping good teachers. Turnover creates an unstable staff that can’t plan long-term, and it forces principals to spend hours on emergency hiring.

“More burden is on teachers [in poor schools] to make that critical difference,” Superintendent Eric Smith said. “There’s a different kind of demand and quite often, you see it resulting in more rapid teacher turnover, younger teaching staffs, teachers that have fewer advanced degrees.”

One concern educators have little control over is parent involvement, widely considered key to a child’s success. Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s parent participation statistics show a dramatic drop in involvement on campuses with high numbers of poor children. At McAlipine Elementary in south Charlotte last year, where two percent of children were poor, more than half the parents volunteered at least twice. At Thomasboro Elementary, where 17 percent of children live in poverty, one in 10 parents volunteered.

“The parent involvement, no matter how much you stress it, just can’t be the same as it is in other schools,” said Newman, the principal at Westerly Hills Elementary. “Many people who do not make enough to make ends meet have to work second shifts. The parent support, when it comes to the PTA, parent meetings, and teacher conferences — it’s difficult.”

 

Balancing Needs, Resources

Failure isn’t inevitable in schools with poor children, Lassiter said. Charlotte-Mecklenberg has never seriously taken on the challenges of impoverished schools, he said, by pumping more money into campuses with higher needs. Lassiter cites systems in other parts of the country that invest heavily in those schools by reducing class sizes, installing more technology, and offering such things as tutoring, child care before and after school, and classes for parents.

“We attempt to do that with roughly equal resources as opposed to where there are greater resources provided based on student need,” Lassiter said. “Now, we don’t have new facilities. We don’t insist that we have the strongest group of teachers who are trained in dealing with children with that background.”

Superintendent Smith sees high-poverty schools as a challenge the school system can take on — if the money is there. “The ultimate question is going to be, is there a commitment to do that, to make up the balance that’s required if we were in that situation?” Smith said.

If not, students’ learning could suffer. Charlotte-Mecklenburg statistics show the higher a school’s poverty rate, the lower the test scores. At McKee Road Elementary last year, with a 2 percent student poverty rate, 94 percent of students could do the work expected at their grade level. Across town at Highland Elementary, a school with an 18 percent poverty rate, less than half the students were performing on grade level.

 

“These Kids Can Learn”

Stan Frazier sees the challenges up close at Merry Oaks Elementary. Merry Oaks is a neighborhood school with a significant number of poor children and others who don’t speak much English.

The first thing Frazier noticed when he took over as principal this school year was the absence of parents around school. He came from wealthier Eastover Elementary, and was accustomed to working with an organized PTA and parents who routinely showed up at teacher conferences.

At Merry Oaks, Frazier greets parents outside every morning to make them more comfortable at school, and said there’s now much more involvement at special activities. He knows parents want the best for their children, but recognizes one of the reasons they don’t often come to school is because some may not have fared well in school themselves.

Frazier is also encouraging teachers like Rus Elliott, who passes at least a dozen other schools to get to Merry Oaks because that’s where Elliott feels he can make the biggest impact on young lives.

And Frazier is constantly searching for money.

He’d like to give Elliott and other teachers a bonus for staying at Merry Oaks. And he’d like to buy more books for classrooms, and pay for field trips for kids. He’s scrounging to raise the $800 he needs to send fourth-graders to Raleigh, and the $1,600 or so it will take to send kindergartners and first-graders to the zoo.

“We wonder why kids don’t do well on tests,” said Frazier, with 23 years in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. “I can talk about how warm the sand feels on my feet, but you want children to experience those things. How do they pass a test, if they’ve never touched a snake, if they’ve never tasted salt water? How do we expect kids to go to the millennium if they’ve never left their park or their neighborhood?”

Despite the struggle, Frazier wants teachers and the school community to believe every Merry Oaks student can be successful. Last year, despite the school’s poverty rate, 65 percent of children were working on grade level. Frazier wants that number higher this year.

“You’re constantly telling your teachers, ‘These kids can learn,’” Frazier said. “You’re constantly telling the parents, ‘These kids can learn.’ You’re constantly telling the public, who may have misconceptions, “These kids can learn.’”

“It can work, and it will work.”

 

Update: The Story Today

On September 10, 2000, U.S. District Judge Robert Potter, a Reagan appointee and political ally of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), ruled that intentional discrimination had been eliminated from Charlotte- Mecklenburg schools, ordered the school board to stop all desegregation efforts, and required the district to pay the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees (over $1.5 million). Potter, nicknamed “Maximum Bob” due to his penchant for tough sentences, is a staunch conservative who in the 1960s had circulated petitions against busing in Charlotte.

On November 30, 2000, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Potter, but a September 21, 2001 review by the full court upheld his finding that the school district has achieved “unitary” (desegregated) status. The court, however, vacated Potter’s prohibition of race-based school assignments, viewing it as unnecessary, and ruled that the district did not have to pay plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education voted unanimously not to appeal the decision, though it is not known what action other parties to the case (most notably, African-American parents who opposed the end of busing) might take.

— Gary Ashwill