Our neighborhood school, Whittier Elementary, is an under-enrolled, low-performing, high-poverty school located in northeast Denver. Some of our neighbors with kids find themselves asking, “Why not follow the many (predominantly Anglo) families and choose a better school?”
More educational choices are available to families now than at any other time in U.S. history: private schools, charter schools, magnet schools, home schooling, vouchers to move children within and across districts, and schools within schools.
Our middle school and high school, Cole and Manual, are in a state of turmoil. The future looks bleak. Why stay? Why send our kids down the street when there are so many intriguing options?
Choicing out of our neighborhood school may not be the only choice we have. The proponents of school choice like to frame the debate this way: Let the “educational market” reign with its array of options, or be stuck with the lousy school in your neighborhood. Rarely will you hear that parents have another choice: They can get involved in their neighborhood school, making it the best possible place for their children to learn.
Because of national efforts to commercialize public education in the name of improving quality, a dear price has been paid in terms of community investment. By encouraging choice, we are fostering educational “commuters,” akin to voluntary busing. When we divest from our neighborhood schools through choice, we are divesting from our community as a whole. Such divestment has even led to the death sentence for vibrant neighborhoods: school closures.
Our whole community suffered when Manual High School closed. Blame can be assigned in equal parts to both DPS for its mismanagement and to the community for its insufficient involvement. Yet, at its closing, community members came out of the woodwork to complain, to volunteer, to point fingers and to serve. Say what you will about how the closing went down; the unintended result is that more folks in the community are aware and involved.
Still, DPS is hedging its bets. When announcing its redesign of Manual and Cole, DPS also unveiled a slew of choice programs for northeast Denver, sort of a “let’s-see-what-sticks” approach. This roll-out of choices is a crapshoot. The demise of the KIPP program at Cole shows what happens when the burden for good schools is on school design and not on full-scale parent and community involvement.
Our neighbors, especially those with means, have an easy out if they want to send their kids to a better school. Unfortunately, that easy choice leaves a fading school and a diminished community in its wake.
Three years ago, a group of neighbors in northeast Denver banded together and made a different choice: to throw our arms around our community school, to give to it, to support it, to volunteer in it. We call ourselves NorthEast Parents for Quality Education, or NEPQuE.
NEPQuE has been active in many ways. Through the Books and Bagels program, community members gather once a month to read to kindergartners. Each spring, Slow Food helps students plant lettuce and corn and such. Later, summer classes trek to the garden to learn about germination and nutrition. When the leaves are falling and the crops harvested, children return excitedly to the garden for the Pumpkin Patch.
NEPQuE sponsors movie nights, ice cream socials and a Back to School BBQ. A hugely successful fundraiser called “I Believe I Can Fly” raised $10,000 for arts programs at Whittier. The top seller at the auction? Birdhouses created by the students of Whittier.
Even so, the most important way a neighborhood can sustain a school is through the enrollment of its children. The year 2007 is crucial for our neighborhood: NEPQuE and DPS have committed to an Early Childhood Education program at Whittier for 3- and 4- year-olds. This partnership is striving to reach a critical mass of parents who will choose Whittier for their children instead of draining it of its students and, as a result, its resources, since each student brings about $6,000 in funding to a school.
A degree of symbiosis begins to happen once a neighborhood supports its school: The school starts to give back to the neighborhood with adult education classes, ESL classes, a community resource center, and even increased property values. The school becomes a place where neighbors gather, to push our children on swings, walk our dogs, do Tai Chi, fly kites, cross- country ski, play soccer or picnic. By serving our entire neighborhood, our school acts as the “buttonhole” through which we thread our lives.
So a school and a neighborhood all become stronger. Our children get the education that we create for them, becoming part of a greater and beautifully diverse whole. Neighbors and parents benefit from a successful school that draws more families to the neighborhood.
School choice? The choice is not an easy one. But for us, it means choosing the school down the street.
