Early in June, I watched children pile off a public school bus at Laurel Hills Park, obviously a wonderful class trip.
I was struck by the fact that one after another after another each student coming off the bus looked very similar. There was only one minority, non-Asian student in the group of 20 students and seven adults, two of whom were dads.
Certain this group must be from a preschool or private or charter school, I asked a teacher; this class was from Salem Elementary, a school in Apex with four nodes of students bused a mere 19 minutes from downtown Raleigh for diversity, a school with 15 percent free and reduced-price lunch population. Without a diversity policy in next year's assignment model, Salem's F and R percentage will go down to nearly zero, and the median family income for the school is certain to rise even higher.
Those 19 minutes the children from downtown are saved will likely cost them the opportunity to benefit from thousands of PTA dollars, from the diverse classroom that research has shown for 20 years will help them reach higher levels of academic success and from a stable work force of highly qualified, satisfied and often more experienced teachers and principals as the research on high-poverty schools clearly shows.
What is just as sure is that the segregation will also cost the students of Salem, when school funds have to be continually diverted to prop up the high-poverty schools that the new majority school board members will create in what they cleverly call neighborhood schools. More and more money will be taken away from textbooks, from teacher assistants and from technology in order to attempt to alleviate disparity that Wake County schools have not seen in 30 years. Equally important, not one child will learn how to cope in our global 21st century world on the most basic of levels.
Welcome to the face of the new community schools model, where our collective tax dollars allow some schools to abound with upper middle class, flexibly scheduled parents, academic resources and class trips across town with abundant coolers and supplies in tow and some schools -and the poorest children in them - simply do not. I deeply mourn the missed opportunities, for both sets of kids.
Kelly Morris Roberts, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of English at Meredith College and parent of two children in Wake County public schools.
