Last week, we reported here on Back Talk that DISD’s board of trustees has tabled — perhaps permanently — a proposal by a group of Ridgewood Park neighborhood parents to redraw DISD’s attendance zone map to allow their children to attend Lakewood Elementary. (You can click here to read the background on this issue.)
So what’s next for the parents?
"Obviously, we are still working to find the best public school option for our kids," says Lenda Green, one of the parents who prepared the proposal to redraw the attendance zone.
Green says she and her husband have an infant daughter who they would like to see attend public schools, but Dan D. Rogers is off the list of elementaries they believe are acceptable due to what Green says are poor test scores — not racial issues (Rogers’ student body is comprised of more than 95 percent Hispanic and black students).
"That’s not the case at all. The biggest concern is the test scores and the performance of the individual schools," Green says. "We want the best option for our kids."
Green’s husband has lived in Ridgewood Park for 10 years, she says, and she moved to the area when they married three years ago. She says that she and other neighborhood parents have visited Rogers "a couple of times" and decided that the school wasn’t for them. She also disputed the idea, advanced by some commenters on our original blog post, that parents concerned about Rogers’ educational quality should simply enroll their children in the school and become personally involved in building the test scores up.
"The numbers that we’re talking about (Ridgewood Park parents with school-age children) are so small — one or two students per grade level, if that — we feel that it was just unrealistic that we would be able to make that degree of difference."
School board member Bruce Parrott, whose district encompasses Ridgewood Park, didn’t return our phone call for comments, but Green says Parrott met with the group a couple of times and put the idea on the agenda at her group’s request. She says the group also spoke with Jack Lowe, the trustee for the attendance zone encompassing Lakewood Elementary. While she says neither trustee endorsed their plan, neither rejected it out-of-hand, either.
Without being specific, Green says the Ridgewood Park parents will review their options, one of which is waiting for the results of the ongoing 2010 Census, which is likely to result in alterations to some DISD’s attendance zones anyway.
