In response to my column about Denver Public Schools’ plans for schools where student growth lags, I heard this from a Lake Middle School teacher:
“Gee — thanks for the support!!! You have contributed to that ‘sinking feeling’!! Seems like with all the gentrification going on in all the old neighborhoods — the newbies want to wipe out all remainers/reminders of the true residents of this community.”
Lake is one of the schools the district has targeted. This teacher was provoked by my statement that I could not name anyone in my daughter’s fifth-grade class who planned to attend Lake, despite the fact it was in the neighborhood, despite its International Baccalaureate program. That reality, I wrote, was already determining the school’s future.
It’s been my experience that some folks in education become sensitive when the obvious is stated. When a school is trying to rebuild its reputation, the last thing its staff wants is undermining public pronouncements. I understand that. I understand the frustration. I also understand this: We are long past the point of politics and public relations.
Lake has an enrollment problem. This is hardly a revelation. It’s not alone. Fewer than 70 percent of DPS students in northwest Denver who could go to middle school in their neighborhoods choose to do so. More than 40 percent of the seats in grades six through eight are empty.
The picture is not much better in any other region of the city. Enrollment is a school’s lifeblood. It determines budget and staffing and course offerings. The more enrollment drops, the more parents tend to look elsewhere. That’s the “sinking feeling.”
Again, this is not a revelation.
A few years ago, while reporting out of North High School, I wrote: “This is what happens when a community abandons a school . . .” I listed the condemned tennis courts, the water fountains the adults in the building avoided, the handful of teachers who had no business in a classroom, the charade of high school “counselors” with 300 students each, the sense of isolation penetrating the building.
Change a few details and I could have written the same sentence about many, if not most, of our city’s middle schools. Lake sits on the southern lip of gentrifying neighborhoods but draws nearly all its students from poorer neighborhoods to the south. Ninety-six percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Skinner Middle School sits atop a bonanza of children, many of educated professionals. Yet it has become an island, so disconnected now it is only 30 percent full.
You could change that, another Lake staffer tells me. If the parents of the neighborhood started choosing neighborhood schools, it would make them better schools. But you’re going elsewhere, so you’re part of the problem. Guilty as charged.
Parents have the power to help shape a school. No doubt. My oldest has been a student at her elementary for six years and for six years THE topic of conversation has been where the kids would go to middle school. Parents agonize over it.
They are believers in neighborhood schools as both beacons and builders of community. They believe in schools that serve all who enter and which do so with expertise and dedication and high expectations. They believe in neighborhood schools as institutions for change, a force that helps shape good students and citizens.
But . . .
We speak as community members of the importance of strengthening our low-performing neighborhood middle (and high) schools. We act as parents asking: Is this choice in the best interest of my child? Sometimes these two roles can be reconciled. Sometimes they cannot.
Neighborhood schools in urban settings succeed when trust exists between the parties at the table: parents, teachers, organized labor, administration. It is trust based on a single belief: The only agenda is the welfare and success of all students. It is a trust manifested in parent engagement, in stability and strength of school leadership, in efficacy of teachers, in clear-sightedness and commitment by the district. It is a trust quantified, like it or not, in data.
And it does not exist within Denver Public Schools, save a few exceptions. I don’t know the last time it did. I don’t know what it will take to repair it. So what we hear is a teacher describing his school’s neighborhood as newbies versus “true residents.”
What we hear are parents saying, we’ll take our high-achieving kids to the neighborhood school, but only in exchange for a written contract from the district promising this, this and this. Or a mother say: “I am so frustrated with the district. My kid is not an experiment. He’d spend a year at a low-performing school and maybe he would flower, but what if he didn’t? What if average is good enough for everybody?”
At the Lake meeting in mid-October, a student said: “I’m trying to be a great person in life. I want everyone to have a great education.”
It was the meeting’s most powerful moment, the expression of a young man’s dream and a community’s challenge.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
