So you think Chapel Hill schools avoid redistricting??? (Carrboro, Franklin: middle-class, home)

[poppydog]

Originally Posted by charge8head

As one white parent said it in the public meeting his child was in minority in the kindergarten. Plan 4 would get the mostly asian kids from 074A and put them in the Northside school together with other minorities there. Segregation forever for the sake of averages?

My child is white and we'd be fine to go to Northside. Many, though not all, of my neighbors are white and they've said they'd be fine if our neighborhood goes to Northside.

How do you figure taking the kids from 74a and sending them to Northside makes that be a minority school? It's not like every kid in 74A is asian and every kid in Northside is African American. Again, this is sounding like these people don't want to go to school in the black neighborhood and it's really distasteful, sad, and backward. It makes me want to advocate for any plan but plan 4.

They did test drive the routes. Our representatives told us that at our last PTA meeting last week. I don't know specifics about the routes. I would imagine they would not be solidified this early on in the game, but the director of transportation has had a say about what could work and what clearly wouldn't.

I'm sorry—I've got to run so have to cut this short. Charge, your posts are not making me feel it for 74A. The other posters make some good points, though.

I will tell you, before the hearing I was more sympathetic to 74a than I am after it. Their rhetoric just leaves me shaking my head.

[jxl83]

First to clarify a few details:
1) From multiple sources, the bus route from 74A will be through seawell school road not the MLK. Somebody pointed out before the time on bus makes more sense than the mileage. Current pickup time is 7:00 – 7:10 and new time can be 6:40.
2) It’s not only school’s obligation to educate the kids. I strongly believe parents’ involvement can make a school better. When we volunteer in Seawell, I feel the teacher not only acknowledge our help, but also try to make appointment with us on one another project to help the class. It has been shown on multiple researches and from our own experience, the volunteering effort from the parents helped the class a lot.
3) ~ 53% kids of 74A are Asians. The local community of Northside is heavily minority populated. The creation of a minority dominant school is possible. District should be able to estimate this now.
4) The cost of transporting 20 kids is different than transporting 200 kids. The method used by the district to calculate the net mileage change is wrong. When the number of kids is included as a weight factor, the net mileage change of Plan 4 is almost the lowest.
5) In Plan 4, one school is categorized over capacity because there is only one more kid.
6) Optimization experts of 74A submitted a more optimal plan, Plan1B to the board for the review three weeks ago and they have not heard anything. All numbers, SES, AT RISK, over capacity, weighted net change of mileage, are better in Plan 1B than any other plans.

Now back to the main point. Busing some kids like 5 years old across the town to balance the SES/AT RISK of a school not in their community is wrong. #12 school will be built on the north side of town. Dear poppydog, I don’t know where you live. I assume you live on the southwest of the district. If #12 needs 100 kids to balance the SES and they found your parcel was a perfect fit, how do you feel about the idea of moving your kids to the north? We feel it’s a bad start to bus kids across the town. This time it happens to us and next time it can happen to you, my friend. We are not necessarily against the plan 1-3. We are against the concept of busing young kids to make the numbers on table looking better. Will this improve the performance of kids of 74A or kids of Northside community? I doubt it. How can kids of 74A and Northside community interact each other after the class?
When a new school was built, is it reasonable to shuffle people to balance SES? I said before there were many parcels next to Nortside with similar SES to 74A, but they were not moved to balance Northside.

Once again, I feel this can be a bad start and next time your kids can be on the bus 45min one way to balance SES.

[poppydog]

No, I don't live on the SW side of town. I'm in the middle of town. Our neighborhood is currently districted for Carrboro Elementary. Before that it was Seawell. Before that it was Carrboro again. At some point before we moved here it was Estes Hills. Our neighborhood has flipped a lot and I don't have a big problem with that. Obviously stability is nice, but when schools are bursting at the seams we need to build new facilities and that necessitates redistricting.

I like Carrboro Elementary and would be happy to have my child stay there. There are some really fantastic teachers coming up for her in 4th and 5th grade (she's in 3rd now) but I am fine if they adopt the plan that moves our child to Northside. It is truly okay with me. I think it's going to be an awesome new school.

Is there something that would keep you from volunteering in a new school like Northside? I am sure Seawell is a great school with very involved parents. We have very involved parents at Carrboro, too. I would expect parents at Northside to also be very involved, especially in the first year. I think that parent involvement is one of the strengths of the CHCCS across the board.

I know families with kids at Carrboro, Estes Hills, Ephesus, Scroggs, FPG, McDougle, and Morris Grove. I don't know anyone I can think of off the top of my head with a child at Rashkis. I've heard more negative comments and fewer positive comments about Morris Grove than any of the others. And the comments that I heard were that MG suffered from a lack of diversity in SES and made the family feel uncomfortable because of that. They ended up moving their child. Completely anecdotal and I'm sure there are many happy MG families, too, but my point is that just because a school is in a "good" neighborhood doesn't mean it's better than another school. I think ALL the CHCC schools are, by and large, excellent. I have no reason to suspect that Northside won't also be an excellent school.

As for "how can the kids of 74A and Northside community interact outside of class"? How do the kids of 74A interact with kids from Northside now? Looking at the current district map half of the Northside neighborhood actually goes to Seawell. These are the same kids your kids are already going to school with. Your kids are probably already friends with these kids. No need to be afraid of them. Seems like it would make the transition to a new school easier to already know a lot of the kids. (I was mistaken upthread and thought they went to Carrboro; the other half of the neighborhood does go to Rashkis.)

[toot68]

The complaints I'm reading here are ridiculous. Northside is not "across town" from parkside. It is one stinking mile from your current school (which I assume you do not consider "across town"). I can (and have) ridden my bike from Seawell to the corner of Umpstead/MLK in about 6 min, on the very route I assume the bus will be taking to northside. I can't ride as fast as a bus can drive. Yes, the bus will burn approximately a half gallon more gas driving past Seawell on its way to Northside (thats two gallons each way for the 4 buses it will take to empty out your neighborhood). But it makes far more sense to move two densely populated neighborhoods with over 200 kids in them en masse than to shift a similar number of kids from dozens of smaller neighborhoods.

[CHTransplant]

Originally Posted by toot68

The complaints I'm reading here are ridiculous. Northside is not "across town" from parkside. It is one stinking mile from your current school (which I assume you do not consider "across town").

Actually, school to school it's 2.6 miles (via Seawell School Road), per Google Maps. (I'm not suggesting that makes a huge difference, just putting a data point out there.)

[CHTransplant]

Here are the primary arguments being put forward by the proponents of Plan 4 (against moving 74A to Northside):

1. It minimizes future reassignments when the next elementary school opens close to 74A.

2. It has the smallest SES variation among the elementary schools.

3. The only statistically significant difference in all the data comparing the four plans is the distance required to bus children to schools. SES, at risk, capacity, math and reading score variations across all plans are not statistically significant.

4. Plans 1 through 3 populate Northside with approximately 3/4 of the students being from non-contiguous satellite segments ranging from neighborhoods south of 54 near Southern Village to the northern neighborhoods close to Interstate 40 and Hwy 86.

5. It minimizes satellite schools, and is the only plan where the majority of schools have 0% of attendees bused in from satellite planning segments.

[jxl83]

Originally Posted by CHTransplant

Here are the primary arguments being put forward by the proponents of Plan 4 (against moving 74A to Northside):

1. It minimizes future reassignments when the next elementary school opens close to 74A.

2. It has the smallest SES variation among the elementary schools.

3. The only statistically significant difference in all the data comparing the four plans is the distance required to bus children to schools. SES, at risk, capacity, math and reading score variations across all plans are not statistically significant.

4. Plans 1 through 3 populate Northside with approximately 3/4 of the students being from non-contiguous satellite segments ranging from neighborhoods south of 54 near Southern Village to the northern neighborhoods close to Interstate 40 and Hwy 86.

5. It minimizes satellite schools, and is the only plan where the majority of schools have 0% of attendees bused in from satellite planning segments.

Thank you for the nice summary. Where did you get the statistics information mentioned in 3. I feel this information is very important. Thanks.

[poppydog]

CHTransplant, although you've laid out some nice looking points that's not all I'm hearing from the proponents on this thread, and I do have to quibble with some of your points in the interest of clarity.

The SES variation point (#2) and your point #3 are misleading. According to the docs posted on the CHCCS website the SES variation in plan 4.1 is 0.73 while "at risk" variation is 21%. The SES variation in plan 2.1 is only 1 percentage point different at 0.74, but the "at risk" variation is significantly lower at 12% compared to plan 4's 21%. So both those related data points combined do create a very clear and very significant advantage for plan 2.1 over plan 4.1 and to suggest otherwise doesn't show the whole picture.

I do think that your point #1 is definitely something the board should consider. They should make it easy on themselves and us and do whatever they need this time around to make the smoothest transition possible when elementary #12 comes on board.

On #4, do you have the numbers of kids from each neighborhood? I couldn't find that on CHCCS's docs. At our PTA meeting last week we did have the numbers for each of our school's neighborhoods, both of dual language (non-movable) and traditional students (movable), but I haven't seen the data on that for the district as a whole, so I'm not sure how many movable/traditional students are in each segment, so I couldn't say if your point #4 is true or not.

On #5, that's again misleading. Why don't you just say that it minimizes satellite neighborhoods and leave it at that. The bit about the "majority of schools have 0%" — misleading. On plan 4, 74a is flipped with 91 and 91a which are apartments up near Timberlyne. They're no closer to Northside than 74a is. It definitely does minimize it, but there are still some other islands out there—even in plan 4—and to suggest otherwise is just misleading.

Now, the arguments I'm hearing on this thread from proponents of plan 4 are all over the place. The strongest argument in favor of it is that it reduces the time kids have to potentially spend on the bus (and won't have to get to the bus stop so early) and creates student bodies that are more frequently (though not entirely) made up of kids who live closer to the schools.

But I'm also hearing:
-Our kids won't be able to interact with kids from other neighborhoods, like Northside, after school (non-issue since Northside kids go to Seawell now)
-Our school has strong parental involvement so we don't want to leave it
-It would be harder for our parents to volunteer at Northside because it's so much farther away than Seawell (1 mile)
-Morris Grove is much closer than Northside (debatable, but sure doesn't look like it on the map)
-Our neighborhood has already contributed to the town
-I love the school we go to now
-Our school now has a great principal
-Our school now has a bunch of great attributes (critters, garden, food drives, etc)
-It uproots our neighborhood
-plans could have been better optimized
-Northside will be a minority school

I think we go backward if we don't take SES and at risk students into consideration. I was ashamed to be a North Carolinian when it was all over the national media when Wake County dismantled their district student allocation plan in favor neighborhood schools instead of the nationally recognized SES model they had used previously. I don't want to turn back the clock and go back to segregated schools. I am, however, just great with neighborhood schools if they can be made equitable for all kids. I think that's wonderful. I am appalled if the reason families don't want to go to Northside, but are willing to go to Morris Grove is because Northside is in a black neighborhood and Morris Grove draws from an affluent population. The schools look equidistant to me.

[CHTransplant]

I wasn't advocating those points, just conveying some of what I've heard. I personally don't have any data to support the claims - you'd have to go to those making the arguments.

[poppydog]

Oh, well, you left out all those other "important" points about how their current school is great and it would be hard for parents to volunteer at Northside, etc.