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Residents
decry proposed student
profiles at Harlan and P.S. du Pont
Board president Joseph Brumskill
joined with some of his north Wilmington neighbors to urge the
Brandywine School District administration and the board not to
turn Harlan Elementary and P.S. du Pont Middle into
'high-poverty urban schools'.
In a highly unusual
move, Brumskill left his seat at the board table to read a
five-page statement on behalf of residents of the district from
which he was nominated to serve on the board during a
public-comment session at the board's May 19 meeting.
The statement
included a proposal to limit the proportion of students from
households with incomes low enough to be eligible to receive
government-subsidized lunches to no more than 42% in elementary
schools and 38% in secondary schools.
Under the most
recent plan to redraw district attendance boundaries, it is
estimated that Harlan would end up with 56% of its enrollment in
that category and P.S. would have 46%. Both would be the highest
in the district for their respective grade levels. By
comparison, the lowest proportions would be 19% at Brandywood
Elementary and 23% at Springer Middle.
Even so, Brumskill
charged, the Harlan and P.S. estimates presented by the
administration are "deceptively low" because they include
children from the suburbs the district expects to be attracted
to the International Baccalaureate and 'gifted'-student programs
to be housed at the city schools. Brumskill questioned whether
that expectation is realistic considering the resultant make-up
of the rest of the student bodies.
"For the sake of
all the children of our district, we cannot afford to further
exaggerate the disparities between our schools," he said.
After Brumskill spoke,
district lawyer Ellen Cooper cut short any further discussion of
the issue on the grounds that a discussion of attendance zones
was not on the posted agenda for the meeting and engaging in it
would violate the state's open-meeting law. The first
public-comment session at board meetings, she said, is limited
to talking about items that are on the agenda. Any topic related
to education, she added, is permitted at a second public-comment
session at the conclusion of the meeting.
She said she
nevertheless let Brumskill continue reading his statement and
did not hold him to the usual three-minute limit imposed on
speakers during the public-comment sessions "because of [his]
position on the board."
Karim Abubakar, a
resident of Brandywine Hills, remained for the second session
during which he presented to the board a petition signed by
state representative Dennis Williams, Wilmington City Council
member Charles Potter and 96 other residents of Brumskill's
nominating district urging adoption of new guidelines for
attendance zones and redrawing the proposed zones accordingly.
Candidates for
election to school boards in the four northernmost districts are
nominated, on a staggered sequence extending over five years,
from seven districts. But the election itself is conducted on an
at-large basis and elected board members are considered to be
serving the entire district and not just representing a specific
area. That somewhat convoluted arrangement is left over from the
1978 federal court racial desegregation decision when it was
imposed as a way to guarantee 'minority' participation on the
school boards.
Brandywine
superintendent Jim Scanlon actually introduced the
attendance-zone issue before Brumskill spoke when he told the
board that, in response to its earlier criticism, the proposed
zones have been "adjusted ... without going back and starting
over at the beginning" to fall within the 20%-to-50%
subsidized-lunch range set as a guideline for the advisory
committee preparing the district's space consolidation plan. He
said the new plan will be presented to the board for discussion
at a 'workshop' on June 9 and approval at its June 23 business
meeting.
The zones have to
be redrawn because the district intends to close two schools and
convert from a four-tier to a three-tier grade configuration,
effective with the academic year which begins in August, 2009.
Harlan and P.S., which are now intermediate schools are slated
to be converted to a first-through-fifth-grade elementary school
and a sixth-through-eighth-grade middle school, respectively.
Harlan's kindergarten is to be housed in a separate area in the
newly renovated P.S. building.
Scanlon also said
that the locations for the district's special programs will be
presented for discussion and approval on the same schedule as
the attendance zones.
In a departure from
usual procedure at 'workshops' Scanlon said there will be
provision made for public comment at the June 5 session.
Brumskill, who was
unopposed in his bid for a second term on the Brandywine board,
has been critical of what he considers ranking the concept of
neighborhood schools above maintaining economic -- and, by
implication, racial -- diversity. In his statement, he referred
to the district's successful effort to, in effect, exempt itself
from the state's Neighborhood Schools Act several years ago by
contending that literal compliance with the law would work a
hardship on its students. He referred to research done at the
time which, he said, "made it clear that increased barriers to
learning result when poor children are concentrated into
high-poverty schools, especially high-poverty urban schools."
In a non-binding
plebecite conducted at the time, district residents voted
overwhelmingly to retain the four-tier desegregation grade
configuration and existing attendance zones.
During the space
consolidation process it was argued that economic status and
student achievement are not necessarily related. In Brandywine,
some schools with higher percentages of students from low-income
households have fared better in state assessment testing.
Brumskill acknowledged that some schools are both high-poverty
and high-achieving, but called them "exceptions rather than the
rule," adding that they are "rarely able to sustain that
performance over time."
Brumskill said that
"most residents did not fully realize [the] implications" when
they supported the planned change to kindergarten-through-fifth
grade elementary schools, but his statement did not call for
reversing that decision.
He said that, in
addition to economic status, such things as the proportion of
special-education students, truancy and disciplinary statistics,
state test performance and level of teachers' experience,
"should be considered in the restructuring so that all schools
face these challenges in equitable proportions."
"The idea of a
diverse learning environment benefiting all students, 'minority'
and 'non-minority', also has merit," he said. "In 2001
Brandywine fought to preserve diversity in its schools, so we
should not take steps backward with the new plan."
The guidelines for
revising attendance boundaries -- also referred to in discussion
as 'feeder patterns' -- in Brumskill's statement are:
For Harlan --
• Reduce the
proportion of students eligible for subsidized lunches to no
more than 20 percentage points higher than the lowest proportion
in any elementary school and cap it at 42%.
• Cap class size at
15 for kindergarten through second grade and at 18 for other
grades, with no provision for waiving those limits. State law
caps kindergarten-through-third grade class size at 22, but
permits school boards to waive that requirement if it cannot be
met.
• Relocate the
kindergarten program from P.S. by remodeling an area at Harlan
and providing a separate entrance.
• Make the
International Baccalaureate program "a whole-school
implementation" in place for kindergarten through fifth grade at
the start of the 2009-10 academic year. Brumskill did not
further explain that provision.
• Provide free
transportation for students who live in the district and choose
to enroll in the International Baccalaureate program.
• Require that
teachers have a minimum of two years of experience.
For P.S. du Pont --
• Reduce the
proportion of students eligible for subsidized lunches to no
more than five percentage points higher than the lowest
proportion in any middle school and cap it at 38%, while
excluding students enrolled in special programs from the
calculation.
• Cap class size at
25 for core subjects in the regular-education program.
• House the
middle-years International Baccalaureate program, now at Talley
Middle, there and provide transportation for students who live
in the district and choose to enroll in the program.
• House the
existing sixth grade 'gifted'-student program there and
establish a 'gifted' program for seventh- and eighth-graders.
• Require that
teachers have a minimum of two years of experience. |