have to disagree...
what is amazing to me is that they had nearly DOUBLE the number of schools needed
from the article:
The district's enrollment of fewer than 18,000 students is about half of what the schools had a decade ago and just a quarter of its peak in the late 1960s.
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sounds like people have been fleeing they crappy school district and for good reason
great post from 'sharon' over on tickerforum:
It seems like only yesterday that a friend (one who quit teaching decades ago) told me that he had been shocked to hear that enrollment was down to about 25,000--and had been over 75,000 when he did his student teaching there in the 70s. Now it's down to 18,000?
Over the decades, the district has closed school after school--some of them palatial (I'm thinking of Southwest High School, where my friend did his student teaching). Southwest was still open in the 90s, and was still more than half empty--almost ghostly-empty--despite having closed the top two stories.
Apart from declining enrollments, there was a period of time somewhere in there when the district built at least one monstrously, staggeringly HUGE new school (I'm thinking of Central High School) in the very teeth of declining enrollments. Nor was the only new school that was built. The money for this came from that $2 billion court-ordered desegragation plan that flooded the district's coffers.
There are several reasons for declining enrollments. As the article notes, the declines started with school desegregation and "white flight" to the suburbs. (The district has long been around 99% minority--mostly black.) Another reason is that the district lost its accreditation around ten years ago, and never got it back. This tells you something about the kind of education a kid gets there. Yet another reason is that many of the district's schools are in an indescribable state of disorder.
I was once told by a security guard that Central Middle had the police come in at one point and throw tear-gas into the classrooms in order to subdue the general state of riot. Not that there was anything unusual going on a the time; that school was always in a general state of riot. And it was one of many.
Not all the schools in the district are that bad. Just most of them. I always thought that Northeast Middle was doing a yoeman's job with a student body that was about half non-native speakers: Asian, Hispanic, Somali, and god knows what else.
The bottom line, however, is that no one really wants to send their kids to school in that district. If enrollments have declined to 18,000 in a city whose population hasn't declined, this kind of suggests that even the minorities are fleeing the district. They really should have shut the damn thing down decades ago.
I hope Blairkiel is right, and this is just a glimpse of the future. Maybe the best way to shut down the public schools, nationwide, is for parents to withdraw their kids from them to the point where it's impossible to justify keeping them open. |
