Same Old System, Shiny New Veneer
Archive - News | Citizen Servatius 05.05.04
BY TARA SERVATIUS
If you brought in a cartographer from Alaska who knew nothing about local politics and showed him last year’s maps of where Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools planned to build and renovate schools in the next decade, he’d be baffled.
The colorful dots representing the new schools CMS has now built, or planned to build or renovate at the time, are mostly in the center, where the bulk of the county’s population doesn’t live. A few stray dots are scattered in the suburbs, where most people in this county do.
The date of these maps, which were part of the Long-Range School Facilities Master Plan, is September 2003, just before a suburban majority took over the school board. This was far more than a building plan; it was a desperate blueprint for one last stab at integration by the same school board that fought in court to keep the system integrated. It was a plan not just to renovate schools, but to cluster the bulk of the newest seats in and around its center, which over time would force white kids to be bused in, reintegrating the system. That’s why many schools already built and renovated under this plan now sit half empty. They were overbuilt, and that was no accident.
To understand how we got here, you’ve got to understand the thinking of the last school board. They knew that without busing, suburban schools would get even whiter, the best teachers would follow, and the disparities would snowball in an endless Catch-22. So the way they saw it, they had three choices: Shut down dilapidated schools in the county’s center, forcing minority kids into suburban schools; build new seats in the center of the county, which would eventually force suburban kids into those schools; or dictate to teachers where they would teach and let the kids follow them, a game teachers wouldn’t be eager to play and that low-income children would never win.
The last school board was midway through option number two when the unforeseen disaster occurred. They lost control of the school board after suburbanites finally noticed that all the school construction they kept voting for didn’t include much for them. The new board has, of course, no intention of filling the extra seats planned and built in the center of the county with suburban kids. Instead, it has completely reversed direction, leaving some of the center county schools that still need work in limbo. Before they’re done, the new board will likely blow hundreds of millions more on suburban schools we should have built five years ago.
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