Decatur’s Assistant Superintendent of Schools Thomas Van Soelen informs us that, as promised, the administration has added free and reduced lunch student breakdowns to all seven of the K-3 redistricting map scenarios. All the relevant data is now available for your perusal in the far-right columns of the scenarios that you already know and love.
Also for comparison, Thomas sends along the current free and reduced lunch rates across all of CSD’s schools.
- Clairemont 22.617%
- Glennwood Academy 33.593%
- Oakhurst 14.558%
- Winnona Park 19.055%
- Renfroe Middle School 28.377%
- Decatur High School 24.78%
Kudos to all for asking for and providing these data.
Completely apart from the redistricting data, these are fascinating data. They almost suggest that the original 2004 reconfiguration was TOO successful–Oakhurst now doesn’t carry its fair share of lower income families. But I’m probably missing some important explanatory factor. If (and only if) low income is linked to performance in CSD, this certainly explains why test scores are highest at Oakhurst lately and lowest at Clairemont.
I’m puzzled why Glennwood has such a high proportion–almost 34%– compared to the elementary schools or the high school. Since its population is derived only from the three elementary schools, looking purely at the basic math, I would have thought that its proportion would be contained within the range of the proportions for the three elementary schools–~15% to ~23%. Something else must be at play. Is it that Glennwood is too crowded to have tuition families but the other schools have them and the tuition families bring up the income average? I know there’s a shelter with families that send their kids to Glennwood but those families ought to have younger and older children too going to the other schools.
Let me suggest that both Glennwood and Clairmont have children who come from Hagar’s House, and I believe those stats are consistent over the years ..
Agree. But the math should still work out since both the numerator and denominator for Glennwood are roughly comprised of the sum of the three respective numerators or denominators for the K-3 schools. UNLESS something is different about Glennwood–e.g. Hagar House has proportionately more kids going there than in the general school-age population? A higher proportion of non-low income families are skipping Glennwood, sending their kids to private school or homeschooling them? None of these explanations seems plausible to me.
Or maybe the free/reduced eligibility changes by school or age group? There’s some factor that is making the math not add up here.
I don’t see these numbers on Map 4. Am I missing something?
I can see them: They are in the column on the far right side of the table:
School F/R Lunch
Out of Decatur 8.06
Clairemont 22.11
Oakhurst 14.98
Winnona 10.56
Glennwood 19.52
Total 16.3
If one looks at low income % alone, and I’m not sure we should, Map 4 has the least disparity among schools. All the others result in either Glennwood or Oakhurst serving a particularly high proportion of low income families.
Of interest:
– Winnona Park never goes above 13% in any option vs 19% now. (Southsiders trying to rig the system so they don’t have to have income diversity—-just kidding!) But am wondering why it Winnona Park currently seems to receive DHA families but won’t in any of the proposed options. Seems odd to me.
– The income balance offered by Map 4 seems to be about sending Gateway families to Glennwood and Allen Wilson Terrrace/Swanton Hill families to Clairemont. It creates a weird wedge in the map which makes me think that it shoud be the other way around–Gateway to Clairemont and AW/SH to Glennwood. Plus Gateway families are used to being zoned with Northwest families, first to Westchester, then to Clairemont. I wonder if families in DHA have any thoughts or concerns? Or maybe the numbers won’t work out any other way.
Could it be that currently WP has all ESOL elementary kids in our district, and the new maps do not reflect that all these kids will go to one school regardless of where they live? Once they all get re-routed to one school (whether it’s WP or some other school) the numbers will change again?
Never knew this. Another interesting fact.
I agree — pretty interesting. I am surprised the numbers are so high. It seems to me the fears about losing economic diversity we hear so often are overblown if about 25% of CSD students are getting free or reduced lunches.
Concern about losing economic diversity is a response to a trend–one that is not visible in a single data snapshot and is reflected only in part by school enrollment data.
The estimated percentage of kids on F/R lunch used for these maps is 16.3%.
The current totals presented above would indicate that it’s a whole lot higher.
Hmm. Another oddity about the numbers. It may be reasonable to expect the proportion of low income families in Decatur to drop over time, hence a higher proportion at the DHS level compared to the K-3 level but ~16% seems a little low. I suspect that there’s some assumptions in the projections that aren’t evident on the maps.
After a very quick glance, it looks to me like Map 4 has the smallest range of F/R lunch numbers and Map 7 has the widest. The racial diversity is more even on Map 4 too. If Oakhurst could take all the ESOL students (that WP currently has) then this might end up being a good option. Is there a huge opposition to Map 4 that I’ve missed?
Why do you think Oakhurst should take the ESOL students? Just wondering, not objecting.
Not sure I’m correctly following this line of thinking. Winnona has the lowest % of non-white students in map 4 and also the lowest % with F/R lunch. Perhaps I’m looking at these figures incorrectly but it seems that moving the ESOL students from Winnona to Oakhurst would skew these figures even more, wouldn’t it?
Yep, sorry, was typing too fast and didn’t spend enough time looking at it. Yes, WP could keep all the ESOL students that it currently has and that would help balance the numbers.
Clairemont has the highest student enrollment in Map 4. Considering all facility and site factors other than classroom count, Clairemont is decidedly the smallest K-3 school in our system. There is quite a disparity between the general space available at the other schools compared to Clairemont.
Good point, another reason that I am wondering why Winnona Park is not being allocated more students. The 2009 Winnona Park Report Card lists enrollment as 341; most of the current options give the school 284 students, a lot less students; one gives it only 223 students, although Option 6 does give it 306 students. Meanwhile, Option 4, which has the least disparity by proportion of low income students, unfortunately is the one that gives Clairemont the most students, 321, whereas the 2009 Report Card lists Clairemont enrollment as only 308. Clairemont still has two trailer classrooms. I can see where Clairemont families would feel like a redistricting that creates a new K-3 school but still INCREASES Clairemont’s overenrollment, rather than decreases it, is not right. This is making me think that Option 4 works best if there are definite plans to reopen Westchester or somewhere else the following year to reduce the enrollment load on Clairemont. If CSD goes to all the trouble to redistrict, which must have inherent costs, it would seem like it would want a plan that didn’t result in continued long-term use of trailers, if at all possible.
Definitely difficult to balance two important factors that will affect instruction and quality of life at the K-3 schools:
1) Overall enrollment and crowding by school
2) Distribution of low income students among the schools
I now understand the reason for Option 6 which is otherwise a bizarre way to cut up the city. It gives all of the schools a reasonable overall population size and doesn’t give any school a shockingly low proportion of low income students. (However, it DOES increase Oakhurt’s proportion substantially now that it’s proportion has fallen to ~14%).
There a quite a few folks in favor of #4.
Oakhurst currently has 345 students with 2 first grade classrooms in trailers. Our community circle can no longer be held inside due to fire safety regulations. 351 students in map #7 may not be a huge surge from what we are experiencing this year but we are indeed bursting at the seams this year. So we add a new K-3 school next year and continue to burst at the seams?
Like karass said there is no clear choice or completely equitable decision here.
Enrollment at WP this year is 380 and it doesn’t seem to be busting at the seams, at least to me. The real problem here is that the WP area is far less dense than the other 3 districts, so increasing their enrollment means sending kids from much further distances to WP.
Re sending kids farther: Well, since the argument for Fifth Avenue was that the city was small enough to take kids from every corner and send them there, I don’t think there’s much of an argument against extending the Winnona Park boundaries a little if it results in less overcrowding in other schools and keeps an even distribution of low income students and the resources they need across the schools. This seems like the perfect solution to me. Take one of the options that has a good even distribution of low income proportions across the schools and then extend the Winnona Park boundaries a bit, perhaps have them hold on to their Swanton Hill families who probably will appreciate not being moved again (they were originally at either Clairemont or Glennwood but were moved to Winnona Park in the 2004 reconfig). I would think that the consultants or school staff or even one of us could figure out how to do this and end up meeting two important criteria: maintaining diversity across the schools and not overcrowding any of them.
One more thing: Winnona Park is at 380 and it doesn’t seem crowded? Wow, it must have a lot more room than Clairemont. Clearly, reducing it down to 223-284 kids doesn’t make sense if other schools are at capacity.
Kudos to CSD for compiling the requested information. Hopefully CSD will soon provide information on the city of Decatur pre-k population currently attending local private/ church community school. That information should be easy to obtain now that we’re well into the school year.
Why don’t they take Map 1 and make a little right thumb on the Winnona district that crosses the tracks and picks up kids from the public housing? Winnona is the largest and probably the nicest facility. It seems like the kids who live in Decatur City should get those spaces. Kids cross the tracks to get to Oakhurst and the 4/5…
That seems like a reasonable suggestion to me.
The last time I looked at these maps I noticed that Winnona’s zone doesn’t go up – in any of the maps – and make obvious, intentional grabs in the public housing areas. And in many scenarios, its border is pretty darn close, so it wouldn’t be like it would have to jump across a huge affluent area to get to these areas.
I feel like you could do this in Map 4 as well and balance things out even more.
Make sure you are all submitting this stuff in writing to the board!
How about take map 5, then move everyone north or Hill Street and east of McCoy (including McCoy) back over to Winnona. Then pick up Swanton Heights and send them from GW back to Winnona. Then you aren’t moving the folks around McCoy Park to a new school (they’d remain at Winnona), you aren’t moving Swanton Heights (my understanding is that they attend Winnona currently), and you are keeping MAK at Oakhurst. I believe that this would have a pretty equal racial/FRL balance too.
Fewer kids moving to a new school… greater diversity among schools.
Sounds good to me. Ask CSD to run the numbers. Or send them to us and we’ll run them.
Except a lot of people on McCoy don’t want to go to Winona since they live in Oakhurst. A lot of people over there were pretty darn mad about getting sent over there and were hoping they would finally be at their neighborhood school.
One of the challenges has been to find enough students to attend Glennwood without venturing south of the tracks into Winnona Park area and dipping past Church into Clairemont area. That is one of the reasons that particular area of Decatur Housing Authority is zoned to Glennwood on some maps – to make sure Glennwood has enough students to merit being open.
Best,
Thomas
But you are going north of the tracks to bring in kids to Oakhurst while a good number of kids in Oakhurst neighborhood aren’t going to their neighborhood school….
To me it looks like modifying map 1 would create the same number of students at Glennwood as Map 4 and Map 7.
Those numbers can’t be right. Oakhurst is allegedly full of poor people. Just ask Dollar General.
Dangit TR, leave that hornet’s nest alone! It’s almost Miller Time!
Bring it Tboy, bring it!