Springfield Republican
By Diane Lederman
October 27, 2009
AMHERST – While the School Committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday night on the redistricting of elementary schools for next year, a group of parents upset with the proposal has scheduled a protest for Tuesday afternoon on the Town Common.
A committee has been working on a range of plans to redistrict the elementary schools for next year when Marks Meadow Elementary School – one of four town elementary schools – is scheduled to close. The committee has held two public forums and met and revised various maps to accommodate concerns.
Last week, the committee studied six proposed maps and the School Committee will likely consider two of those plans.
The School Committee in May voted to close Marks Meadow at the end of the 2009-10 school year to save money and then redistrict in a way that there would be an equal number of children receiving free or reduced lunches at the three remaining schools. Currently Crocker Farm has the largest number of students receiving free and reduced lunches.
But parents have organized the march to protest redistricting and the closing of Marks Meadow School, stating in an e-mail to the community that the committee’s decision “does not reflect the needs of our children nor their communities. We believe their plan will be harmful and divisive to the multicultural fabric of our town.
“We believe this plan will create animosity between those that struggle economically and those of a more privileged community. We don’t feel it is fair to bus children to new schools within the Amherst school system just because they qualify for free or reduced lunch. Furthermore, we are not convinced that moving our children to new schools will improve the quality of their education. We feel that forced busing of low-income, multicultural-multilingual children is offensive,” the e-mail states.
But on her School Committee blog, member Catherine A Sanderson refuted the charges. Under any redistricting plan, she wrote, “the majority of kids on free or reduced lunch will, in fact, attend the exact same school they attend right now, as will the majority of kids not on free or reduced lunch.”
Parents protesting the redistricting don’t believe “dispersing children who qualify for free or reduced lunch or are multicultural or multilingual into more affluent schools will improve test schools or their abilities to learn.”
But Sanderson, also a psychology professor at Amherst College, stated that a “body of well-established research indicates that low-income children who attend schools in which more then 40 percent of the children are on free/reduced lunch do not perform as well as those who attend schools with a smaller proportion of students on free/reduced lunch.”
School Committee Chairman Andrew M. Churchill said the committee “can’t afford not to close Marks Meadow.”
“We’ve been thinking about the inequities for a number of years,” he said. “It’s not like we’re a big city (traveling) huge distances.” Some students might be bused four or five miles, he said.
The committee needs to make a decision now because the budget needs to be done for January this year. The administration needs to have the districts set up to seek request for proposals from a transportation company.
The protest is slated for 4 p.m. today with the School Committee meeting slated for 7 p.m. at the Amherst Regional High School.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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3 comments:
Anonymous said...
CS- in response to your response to MB's suggestions on map # 4- is violating a "tenant" of the map really as bad as discriminating against renters? Dividing both the apt. area and amherst woods is not the same as dividing a street- both are large neighborhoods. Months ago when the first couple of maps were floated, a large number of amherst woods dwellers said that they would be happy to move to crocker farm for the good of the town.
Whey do "ALL" families have to think it's the best choice for it to go forward? There is no such unanimous agreement on any other plan. Many people will be "mad" about something because it affects their kids and households. Even though some will be unhappy with end of language clustering doesn't mean it is right to discriminate against them. In fact, they will be mad about the end of clustering with every map. The right thing has to be done even if the thing that makes people the maddest can't be avoided.
(a) create inequity in the schools (e.g., a spread of 6/7/8% in terms of kids on FRL), (b) still divide the kids off of East Hadley Road into two buildings (and not allow school choice, meaning some kids change schools), (c) violate a tenant of the map which was to avoid dividing neighborhoods, (d) increase transportation time/costs (many more kids on East Hadley Road would go to FR than in the current plan which is the furthest school from their homes, plus many kids living in East Amherst/Amherst Woods would go to CF which is a longer bus ride), (e) overall requires more kids in our community to transition to new schools than in maps 5 or 6. Now, maybe those are all reasonable trade-offs in order to avoid the islands. But I ONLY want to experience all of those trade-offs (which do mean more kids/families in transition AND greater costs for transportation AND less equity between our schools) if all families really think that is the best choice ... AND I do NOT want to experience these trade-offs if many families off of East Hadley Road are just still then going to be mad that school choice is out and language/culture clustering is
Some clear and convincing answers to questions raised by opponents of the plan:
“the majority of kids on free or reduced lunch will, in fact, attend the exact same school they attend right now, as will the majority of kids not on free or reduced lunch.”
So the SB has accomplished something important and done so in a way that affects a group smaller than the majority of students.
a “body of well-established research indicates that low-income children who attend schools in which more then 40 percent of the children are on free/reduced lunch do not perform as well as those who attend schools with a smaller proportion of students on free/reduced lunch.”
School Committee Chairman Andrew M. Churchill said the committee “can’t afford not to close Marks Meadow.”
Anon @ 7:33 PM, thanks for arguing passionately about the choices on the table and not simply opposing redistricting altogether.
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