The Correct Decision

Most of you have probably heard by now that in their work session on Tuesday, the BOE voted to de-magnetize Daniels Middle School. Of course, most of you know that I believe this was the correct decision. It was not an easy decision for the board, but it was absolutely the right one.

I attended the work session on Tuesday because of my obvious interest in the magnet discussion, but I encourage all of you to attend a work session at least once if you can. The public is allowed to quietly observe and I took advantage of this for first time on Tuesday. This will come as no surprise to those who know me, but I had a very hard time with the 'quietly observe' part. :-) I even slipped a note to Beverley Clark during one of the discussions (more on that in another post).

I took copious notes of the entire session and will post those at a later time, but I will give a brief synopsis of the Daniels discussion.

Most of the discussion centered around whether or not Daniels would be a 'healthy' school if it wasn't a magnet. Could a reasonable base population be drawn into the school while maintaining a healthy F&R%? The general consensus was yes. With only a 14% magnet student population and a 30% F&R, its pretty much a base school already.

Lori Millberg brought up the fact that we have 3 IB elementary, 3 IB middle and 2 IB high schools. Considering that 3 elementary schools can fill 1 middle school, she and others questioned the number of IB schools we have and their balance.

There was an inordinate amount of hemming and hawing about what to do. Beverley Clark mentioned her reluctance to move out large portions of Daniels' base only to replace them with magnet students who would not change the school's profile (F&R%). She commented more than once along the lines of 'if a school can have a reasonable base drawn then it shouldn't be a magnet'. Yet she (and everybody else for that matter) was unwilling to make a motion to de-magnetize Daniels. After about 20 minutes of this back and forth, Millberg finally told Beverley to just make the motion already, to which Clark replied "I was waiting for somebody else to make it". Watching everybody dance around the subject was one of those times when it was hard for me to stay quiet, and when Lori Millberg made her comment I said a resounding "YES!" in agreement :-)

The motion was seconded and then passed with only Kevin Hill, Eleanor Goattee and Anne McLaurin voting no. I don't recall hearing any argument from any of them as to why Daniels should be spared. The only argument I heard came from David Ansbacher, the Director of Magnet Programs. He brought up the fact that Daniels went through this very situation before. It was a magnet school in the 1980s (I think) due to declining enrollment and rising F&R. Once the school was in a situation similar to the one its in now, they demagnetized it. Over the course of about 6 years, the population dwindled and the F&R rose again so they made it an IB magnet.

He expressed concern that the same thing will happen and in another 6 years they will be having the discussion to re-magnetize Daniels. Ansbacher also mentioned the fact that the Daniels base has private options available nearby, such as Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Timothy's and that many of those families can 'take advantage of'. Additionally, Daniels base parents could apply to charter schools such as Magellan and Endeavor as well.

Ansbacher's comments reinforced an idea that I have suspected but had never heard directly expressed by a staff member before. Basically when he said that some of the families can 'take advantage of' the private school options in the area, it means that some of those families have the financial means to go private. WCPSS cannot afford to have 'wealthier' families leave schools like Daniels because it will be harder to fill those empty seats with other non-F&R families.

Many families in Apex, North Raleigh and Cary have left WCPSS for private, charter and even homeschools, but we are a dime a dozen. If we leave the system, there are plenty of others who can take our place in our overcrowded schools. While I understand the concern about Daniels and other schools in less crowded areas, there is something fundamentally wrong with this way of thinking.

Lots of parents around the county are not happy with the level of academics and opportunties available to their children. But if this particular population deems that the standard level isn't good enough for their children, we are going to give them more than everybody else? That seems to be counter to the WCPSS belief that everybody deserves a good education and that where you can afford to live shouldn't dictate the quality of your schools.

If you get a chance, write to your Board of Education member to let them know that de-magnetizing Daniels was the correct decision. Difficult, yes, but correct.

Just For Fun--Davis Drive Real Estate Sales

Most of us probably think of Davis Drive families as fairly wealthy and many of us think they are elitists who don't think their school should be 'burdened' by high needs children. I have even heard a staff member from WCPSS say in response to a comment about DDE's high achievement, "Well, there's a reason why Davis Drive is a School of Excellence". The dedicated teachers and parents? No, this staff member was referring to Davis Drive's low F&R percentage. At 9.8% (2007-08 school year), it is one of the lowest in the county. And since non-economically disadvantaged students pass the EOGs at a rate significantly higher than economically disadvantaged students, it follows that Davis Drive's overall test scores will be higher. But does this necessarily mean that Davis Drive deserves the image that it has?

First of all, although Davis Drive's F&R is well below the county average of 31.6%, the school's percentage of ESL and LEP (Limited English Proficiency) students are slightly above the county average. And while Davis Drive has a much smaller percentage of black students than the WCPSS average for elementary schools, the percentage of asian students is much greater. So while the racial makeup of the school is probably not what WCPSS would like to see, it is nonetheless a racially diverse school.

Second, does the fact that a school has a very low F&R mean that the rest of the population is high income or wealthy? When Davis Drive parents protested reassignment last year, we saw footage of beautiful homes and manicured lawns. I'm sure that many of us made assumptions about how much those houses cost and the types of families who live in them. But were we correct?

I was meeting with a group of Davis Drive parents last month when I mentioned that I was thinking about researching home prices in some of the ITB magnet base nodes. I wanted to show that many of those reaping the benefits of magnets weren't in low income neighborhoods . One of the women had already done that research for one of the neighborhoods assigned to Davis Drive for the opposite reason--to show that Davis Drive wasn't composed of elite, expensive subdivisions like the image suggests. So I thank her for giving me the idea for my research and for the google documents spreadsheet setup. :-)

While the homes in these Davis Drive nodes are not inexpensive by any means, they are also not as expensive as some people might think. And especially not as expensive as homes in western ITB as noted in my previous posts on Underwood, Joyner & Martin. I've included all of DDE's nodes except for the 2 low income nodes that are bused in.

One other stat that I noted to myself: Of the 87 homes that sold in the Davis Drive nodes in the last year, only 14 of them were more than the lowest median price for the Joyner and Underwood base nodes. Underwood's node 92 had a median Single Family Home sales price of $386K.