Page 4 of 4
School board member Molly Griffin says the situation is the biggest issue facing the school system right now, and that she brings it up at board meetings every chance she gets.
"You want to say it in a way that states the facts without using buzzwords that will make somebody angry," said Griffin. "But the fact is that the school system doesn't look like the county and that is a problem for me."
But Griffin says there won't be any easy answers for Mecklenburg County like there were for the Wake County school system, which caps poverty levels at individual schools at 40 percent. Just over 30 percent of Wake students are on the free and reduced lunch program.
"The point I try to make is that we are pushing 50 percent poverty as a system," said Griffin. "So how do you think we are going to cap poverty at 40 percent like Wake? The mathematical model doesn't work."
The social model doesn't work either, says Armor.
"The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board should be very concerned about its policies, because if it is perceived as adopting policies that are anti-white and pro-minority, the system will become predominantly minority," he said. "Then it will be very hard to have any level of integration in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Although there is no white flight yet, it is only a matter of time until white enrollment will begin to decline if the current trends continue."
But if the system continues on its current path, it also risks being sued for doing too little to reduce high concentrations of race and poverty that are as much a result of its current student assignment plan as of the system's and the county's changing demographics.
Both Rossell and Clark say that the only way to target both problems is with integrated magnet schools located in the suburbs.
"You make them attractive to whites and minorities and you try to keep the numbers sort of slightly majority white, 55-45, and they tend to work," said Clark. "That means you've really got to be creative to get integration going."
But, Rossell warns, you've got to be careful there, too. After the Rockford, IL, school district went on a building spree in the fast-growing, largely white suburbs and moth-balled several partly full schools with high-minority concentrations in the early 1990s, it was successfully sued for discrimination and spent years under a court-ordered desegregation plan that drove whites out and taxes up.
School Board Member Louise Woods says she isn't overly worried about the situation. The decrease in the percentage of white kids in the system doesn't mean that it's getting less diverse, she says, because black and Hispanic children students increasingly come from many different countries.
Woods takes the opposite view of the tipping point-obsessed academics we spoke to. She says she believes that middle-income parents, both white and black, are uncomfortable with schools that are racially homogeneous and want more, not less diversity in schools. In fact, the school system should positively market its diversity as a way to attract parents who at present might be educating their children outside the public school system.
"I think we need to pay attention to the quality of every school and pay attention, where at all possible, to having more diverse populations in as many schools as possible because I think middle-income families are more comfortable and often will flee schools that are less diverse," she said.
Woods also points to the fact that this year, about the same number of white kids entered kindergarten in our school system as did black children. It's unclear whether this is the beginning of a new trend, because the number of whites appears to shrink at just about every grade level after that, but Woods remains hopeful.
Meanwhile, as urban and suburban parents become increasingly shrill in their conflicting, and ultimately competing, demands for change, one thing is becoming abundantly clear. There are some very tough decisions ahead, and someone will have to begin making them soon.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com.
