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Race won’t be considered in school boundary change
Submitted by Leah Shaffer on November 9, 2007 - 1:51pm.
By Leah Shaffer
In a decision last week, the Eden Prairie School Board voted to not factor in racial balance when looking at the upcoming elementary school boundary change.
In a letter to parents, the Superintendent Melissa Krull cites the recent Supreme Court decision that limits how schools can factor race in determining enrollment, as a reason for the change.
“We’re stepping back from making the boundary changes we had been talking about,” said Eden Prairie School Board Chair Carol Bomben.
“We still will be looking at some boundary changes, but they’ll be based more on the capacity at the schools,” she noted.
Since last spring, the school district has been planning for a boundary change that would take into account the goal of distributing students of color more evenly in different elementary schools.
Forest Hills Elementary is expected to be classified by the state as “racially identifiable,” meaning its percentage of students of color is more than 20 percentage points higher than the district’s percentage.
Forest Hills has 42 percent students of color; Prairie View Elementary is at 19 percent; Cedar Ridge Elementary is at 25 percent and Eden Lake is at 27 percent.
“What our step back from this is, that it’s really just making a commitment to address the needs of kids in the places where they are,” said Bomben.
Instead of using boundaries as a strategy to meet the needs of kids, “we will be looking at other strategies, whether it’s class adjustments, whether it’s more resources …”
Bomben noted that this approach would be, “in the long run, better received by families as well as by kids.”
Supreme Court
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision, made this summer, affects how school districts can factor race in school assignment. According to the school district’s letter to parents, after consideration of that decision “and in recognition of the challenge of transition for our students and their families at all of our elementary sites – especially Forest hills, we have decided to pursue a much less extensive boundary change model to address only the inequity in overall enrollment numbers as related to available space.”
However, according to one expert, the Supreme Court’s decision on the case involving Seattle and Louisville school districts should not impact boundary change decisions.
Myron Orfield said that “far from cutting against it, it strongly supports what they did and it provides a very firm legal basis if they want to do that.” Orfield is associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, and executive director of the Institute on Race and Poverty.
Orfield has discussed the importance of integrated school districts in the past. He has lauded Eden Prairie for keeping its district relatively integrated, compared to other suburban schools.
According to Orfield, there’s nothing in the Supreme Court opinion that would stop the Eden Prairie School District from changing boundaries to integrate the system.
He said the case the court dealt with involved assigning kids outside of their neighborhoods into magnet schools. It said you could use race in those decisions but it would have to be one of many factors used in assigning kids.
He said using boundaries to try to encourage racial integration for elementary schools is something that Justice Anthony Kennedy explicitly said was fine.
“Their action is completely supported, almost endorsed by Justice Kennedy,” he said, speaking of making boundary changes to integrate.
In his separate opinion, Kennedy states that school boards can bring about a more diverse student body through “other means including strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general recognition of the demographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance and other statistics by race.”
Though Orfield could not speak to the specifics of Eden Prairie’s case, he noted, “Racially integrated schools are good for neighborhoods and they’re good for kids.”
Bomben said to have moved forward with a boundary change, having not tried other strategies to address the achievement gap between students of color and white students wouldn’t be in the best interests of the kids.
She said they are using strategies at Forest Hills that have been very successful but they need to be able to complement that and try some other things as well.
Some of what could happen in a boundary change is you’d disrupt a lot of families, something that may not necessarily address the achievement gap, according to Bomben.
“I think what we need to do in the interests of kids is to bring the services to the kids and not necessarily move our kids and families around.”
The next step in the process will involve forming two committees. Bomben explained that one committee will look at strategies that will be put in place to support learning at elementary buildings.
Another committee will look at boundary changes based on the number of students in each facility. The district could adjust boundaries to even out student enrollment at the schools. For instance, Cedar Ridge has a student population that exceeds 900 while Forest Hills has almost 650 students.
Forest Hills parent and School Board candidate Myrtle Chandler was both surprised and pleased with the change from the School Board, which voted on the issue last Wednesday.
“Definitely I had major concerns with how fast that decision was going,” she said about the initial boundary change plan.
Before the board makes changes, they need to understand why the parents of Forest Hills chose that school to begin with, she added.
“By that reversal decision, they are king of going back and hearing that.”
In terms of Forest Hills becoming “racially identifiable,” Bomben noted that the law does not require that you make a boundary change, “It requires that you make a plan.”
Though the legal issues surrounding this were a factor in the board stepping back from this decision, according to one legal expert, changing boundaries is well within a school district’s right.
Bomben emphasized that boundaries are just a strategy to address the issue of meeting the needs of students.
“It’s one approach.
“This really allows us to look at what are the other tools that we can use.”
