School officials presented two proposals Monday night for assigning students to schools that could bring back the closest thing Boston has had to neighborhood schools since before the days of desegregation.
The most dramatic proposal would scrap the notion of geographic attendance boundaries and cross-city busing by simply allowing students to attend the closest school to their home with available seats. The other proposal would carve the city into 23 attendance regions, giving most parents a choice of two, three, or four schools, while subdividing almost every neighborhood, including East Boston and West Roxbury.
Comments
Integration isn't solely achieved by where a child attends school six hours a day. Yes, it's a key component, but providing children an environment where they learn to grow and respect persons of all races and creeds isn't just the domain of a school district; it starts at home.
Apparently, the City of Boston has decided to try reliving the Pixie Palladino era. It fights right in with the implicit racism of the national GOP campaign and its local boy-wonder (maybe this is Mayor Menino's other shoe after his belated endorsement of Elizabeth Warren), not to mention the newest round of gerry-mandering in drawing district boundaries. This is a bad, bad bad idea.
Oh, and "wickedwritah", your comment is surely true. Nevertheless, a return to segregated schools will DESTROY the efforts of generations to overcome the pervasive racial bias that led to Boston's court-ordered busing.
If a certain area of the city is deemed to be at a disadvantage due to a lack of ethnic diversity, would the answer be to force people to pack up and move to another neighborhood? This the flaw in the whole idea of busing. If the quality of life in a given area is substandard, then that is the problem to be addressed. Forced bussing is the kind of hare-brained scheme that gives us liberals a bad name. No more bandaids- heal the wounds!
Nobody has ever proposed to "force people to pack up and move to another neighborhood". It doesn't sound like you lived in Boston before this "hare-brained scheme" was put in place -- if you did, you'd see the DRAMATIC improvements in neighborhoods that have resulted since then. The wounds ARE being healed -- that's why it's important to continue doing what's working.
Brookline Tom - your school system's percentages of Latino/a and African American are signficanly below the state average, and dramaticlaly below that of the metropolitan area - your system has more than double the Asian - so seems like you value diversity as a concept - - -