At Thursday’s school board meeting, trustees will consider a proposal to add about 400 homes in the Ridgewood Park Neighborhood Association area to the Lakewood Elementary School attendance zone — plucking students from Dan D. Rogers’ home turf. Although DISD’s administration has said the proposal is not being recommended for approval, it has stirred up a small hornet’s nest of controversy.
Something to keep in mind while considering this story: Rogers’ student body is about 99 percent Hispanic and African-American, while Lakewood’s is more than 70 percent white. And the Ridgewood Park neighborhood is predominantly white. But according to the petitioning homeowners, the real issue is school performance: Rogers’ academic rating is far below that of Lakewood and Stonewall Jackson Elementary.
Be forwarned: This is a long blog post, but I can’t see a way to write a short version that doesn’t paint one side or the other as intractable, racist, elitist or worse.
We first noticed a post at Allen Gwinn’s Dallas.org Tuesday talking about the proposal. The idea has rather miraculously escaped significant discussion and attention in Lakewood, a historically activist hotbed of parents; surprising even more so because its approval could significantly impact Lakewood, J.L. Long Middle School and Woodrow Wilson High School, a feeder pattern of schools that are all at or over-capacity in terms of students.
Gwinn’s post quoted an anonymous former Rogers parent suggesting that racism is behind the proposal — you know, white parents don’t want their kids attending a school where there aren’t many other white kids. But the quote was anonymous, and it’s easy to label someone else as a racist when you don’t have to put your name to the sentiment.
To find out more, we put in a call to DISD’s public information staff, school board trustee Bruce Parrott (Rogers is in his district), five members of the Ridgewood Park neighborhood association board, a couple of Lakewood feeder pattern parents, and the guy listed on the board package (look for Section 7, Part C, 3a) as DISD’s executive director of initiatives and planning.
All of the official types must have been either busy Tuesday or didn’t want to wade into the fray, so no comments came our way. The parents I contacted returned my calls quickly but didn’t know anything about the plan. I also contacted Stonewall Jackson Elementary parent and Long SBDM chairman Vince Murchison, who voluntarily spends a fair amount of time attending district meetings; he made a call and obtained a copy of the documents being considered by the board (click here to download the multi-page DISD agenda pdf Murchison provided).
Then one of the five voice mails I left with neighborhood association people paid off: Former Ridgewood Park neighborhood association president Kathleen Lynch, a self-proclaimed avid Advocate reader, returned my call and filled in a lot of the blanks.
Ridgewood Park, Lynch says, has about 400 homes in its neighborhood, which is bounded by Abrams, Fisher, Lovers and the DART line. Most of the homes are 1,500- to 1,800-square-foot "starter homes" filled primarily with singles, young married couples and, Lynch says, not enough couples with young children who want to stick around and continue building the neighborhood up.
"As soon as families start having children, people start putting a for-sale sign in their yard," Lynch says. "It has been an issue that has been hashed around for several years. No one wants to send their kids there (to Rogers), and we just lose our really good families."
When Lynch was the association’s president from 2000-2004, the idea of seceding from Rogers was bandied about from time to time, she says, but it’s a polarizing issue in the neighborhood so the board chose not to take any action. During the past couple of years, a group of neighborhood parents decided to take the idea to the next level, Lynch says, talking with former school board member Leigh Ann Ellis and scheduling an October 2009 meeting with Ellis and DISD Supt. Michael Hinojosa. Lynch says it was one of the best-attended association meetings ever — about 55 people showed up to weigh the pros and cons of Rogers and the neighborhood’s attachment to it.
The association board decided to allow interested neighbors to establish a subcommittee to take the issue forward, with the association vowing not to take a stance either way, Lynch says. So that’s what happened: A subcommittee led by neighborhood resident Amy Crowell proposed the boundary change to DISD, which conducted a study addressing how adding 400 homes could impact the Lakewood feeder pattern (click here to read the subcommittee’s two-page proposal to DISD). The information Crowell’s group gave DISD says Rogers’ poor performance on standardized testing is the primary reason for the request: Rogers’ students score about 20 percent to more than 50 percent lower than peer schools in Math, Reading, Science and Writing scores.
DISD didn’t take the test scores into account while analyzing the proposal. Instead, DISD focused on impacted school capacities: Lakewood would likely receive an additional 23 students, with 15 existing Rogers students relocating and eight additional students coming from "non-Dallas ISD students currently living in the Rogers attendance zone" (that probably means these students attend private schools now). But the longterm impact was a bigger concern for DISD administrators, with the reorganization causing overall estimated enrollment of 758 for Lakewood, compared with 680 students there now and an on-paper capacity for the school of 617 — overcapacity of 23 percent. Similar impacts were noted for Long (32 percent overcapacity with the change) and Woodrow (36 percent overcapacity with the change, which is no change from current enrollment).
As a result, DISD administrators are not recommending that the board of trustees approve the Ridgewood neighborhood association’s subcommittee proposal.
Throughout the process, Lynch says, DISD didn’t give the neighborhood any indication the proposal would be approved. Parrott wasn’t involved until his election in December, and his stance isn’t known since he didn’t return our phone call. (It should be noted, however, that a DISD employee in Parrott’s office says Parrott is not "sponsoring" the proposal, as has been reported elsewhere.) Ellis and Hinojosa discussed the possibility of Rogers becoming a Montessori school, Lynch says, and that move would create another set of problems — all current Rogers students initially would be reassigned to other schools, and anyone who wanted to attend the new Montessori school would have to "test in".
"The only inkling of hope we had at the (October) meeting was if they made Rogers a Montessori school, they would have to feed us into another (elementary) school," Lynch says.
And although Lynch doesn’t have a dog in this hunt (no children at DISD), she says the neighbors’ concern here is not now, has not been and never will be racial. The neighbors pushing for the change don’t mind their children attending school with Hispanics and African-Americans, Lynch says, but they do mind their kids attending a school where the test scores are significantly lower than peer schools and where much of the student body is transient since most of the students live in the nearby apartment complexes.
Amy Crowell, the parent leading the association subcommittee, sent me an email with the neighbors’ proposal to DISD attached, but I wasn’t able to catch her on the phone to follow up with additional questions.
At this point, the board is scheduled to consider the issue Thursday and could vote on the proposal Feb. 25. We’ll let you know what else we find out.
