It is heartbreaking that after decades of school reform efforts, students’ home addresses still seal most of their academic fates.
Children in poorer neighborhoods are usually assigned to low-performing schools. That system perpetuates itself into dismal outcomes and a cycle of poverty.
Denver Public Schools is to be commended for trying a different approach. The district has encouraged choice, but even that effort has its limitations.
Students who live within a school’s boundary generally have first choice — so the schools often still resemble the neighborhoods.
The district has moved to widen the net by creating larger boundaries — shared enrollment zones that guarantee a spot in one of many schools within the area.
The goal is to promote school choice, break down barriers between charter schools and district-run schools, and add more racial and economic diversity, as The Denver Post’s Yesenia Robles and Eric Gorski.
In DPS’s seven enrollment zones, the diversity push remains a work in progress.
Denver’s school board on Thursday takes up whether to add an enrollment zone for northwest Denver’s middle schools.
The plan has been controversial, exposing cultural and racial fault lines in the gentrifying area.
Affluent and white parents worry their children will not get into the popular Skinner Middle School. They are concerned their only other local choice would be STRIVE Prep-Sunnyside — a college prep charter school that serves mostly Latino kids.
STRIVE families feel their school is being unfairly maligned by the very people who changed their neighborhoods.
We hope the school board pushes ahead with the plan.
The enrollment zone concept empowers parents to choose good schools for their kids. It provides equity between charter and traditional schools.
It also can encourage diversity and break the shackles that unfairly tie an address to a single, low-performing school.
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