There’s a raging debate over in Guilford County (home to the city/towns of Greensboro and High Point) about school districting.  From what I can tell they’ve been experimenting with various school districting schemes and nothing has worked, and now parents are pushing for neighborhood-based schools.  A couple of good opinion posts about it can be found on Dave Hoggard’s and Sue Polinsky’s blogs.

Sue uses a great analogy to frame the debate.  Basically she says that the forced segregation of schools is an effort to be a lamp to shine the way to a better society and not a mirror of the reality that we all live in.  She also points out the inherent problems with this situation.

From a personal standpoint I can tell you that growing up my schools had a very strong influence on my worldview.  The first 6 1/2 years of school I never had one non-white kid in my class, and then in November of my 7th grade year we moved to Arlington County, VA which is basically an urban environment.  Overnight I was a minority (there were more ‘other’ races than whites in the school).  Definitely opened my eyes. 

My friends came from all over the world: Italy, Japan, India, Mexico, Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Texas.  This was during the after effects of the Vietnam war so we also had a lot of Cambodian kids who’d come over essentially as refugees.  It was interesting to me that many of my friends, who’s dads worked at their countries’ embassies or for multi-national companies, wanted nothing to do with the refugee kids or the children of the illegal immigrants. They viewed those kids as lower class and were actually rougher on them than the American kids, black or white, were.

By ninth grade most of the kids had divided into gangs, all of which were made up of different races.  One day the blacks would fight the whites, the next day the whites would fight the Vietnamese who would then fight the Mexicans, etc.  One thing all the gangs had in common: 99% of their members were either poor or came from "bad" families.  Middle class black kids and white kids didn’t belong to gangs.  Diplomats’ kids didn’t belong to gangs.  Most interesting: children of refugee parents who were doctors, lawyers, etc. in their home country didn’t belong to gangs.  They were dirt-poor but their parents worked multiple jobs and emphasized education above all else.  These kids didn’t play sports either.

The point is that without moving to Arlington I probably never would have seen the disparity within different races.  I realized at an early age that all races were different in things like dress and food, but remarkably similar in one very important way: they all had their own class structure.  That’s an important lesson I don’t think I would have gotten in my white-bread schools and I can’t think of another place after school that I would have gotten it either.  Well, maybe all those public basketball courts I played on growing up, but that’s a whole different world.

Here’s the difference between my experience and what is going on in Guilford County: we had all that diversity in Arlington within neighborhood schools.  School zones could be drawn up geographically and still have the diversity I mentioned.  That’s because it was a little melting pot.  I don’t know that the parents in Arlington would have been any different from the parents in Guilford if their kids would have been forced to go across town to go to school.  It just wasn’t an issue for them, but if you ask me I think Guilford parents have the right idea in asking for neighborhood schools.  If the neighborhoods aren’t diverse then so be it. 

I’ll end by saying that where I live now, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County has an interesting system for the schools: If you don’t like your "core" school you can pick from up to two other schools and get free busing.  My oldest son has a friend who buses from another school’s zone and it takes him quite a while to get to and from school, but it’s worth it to his family in order for him to go to a better school.  The price is that the school system has to work very hard to work out transportation logistics, but in my mind it’s worth it because it allows parents to choose the right situation for their kids.  Maybe it’s the neighborhood school, and maybe it’s not, but they get to choose.  Maybe Guilford should look at the Forsyth system.