A lot of hurt feelings could have been avoided if better planning had gone into building Elizabeth Duncan Koontz Elementary School. Students wouldn’t be so crowded, teachers might not feel so overwhelmed by having to deal with a lot of at-risk students, and school board members would not be dancing around the at-risk label while they debate what to do with this new, overcrowded school.
Who knows? The school might have even started the year with enough books.
What’s done is done. The Rowan-Salisbury School system can’t go back and design a bigger Koontz Elementary, and the board decided this week not to redraw district lines.
But board members still have the power to alleviate some of the pressures on Koontz, and they have a duty to learn from this experience. They should be more skeptical and questioning of redistricting lines and projections that staff members present.
Space is the easiest issue to handle; Rowan-Salisbury has had mobile classrooms for years. (In fact, there’s a fleet of them on the front lawn of the East Rowan High School, despite the construction of neighboring Carson High.) The system has access to mobile units it can move to Koontz, and that should happen over the summer.
The fact that Koontz has a high percentage of students “at risk” or on free and reduced lunch is harder to address. Several years ago, the system stopped assigning students on the basis of race, choosing instead to focus on the number of students on free and reduced lunch; poverty and difficulty in school often go hand-in-hand. So school officials drawing district lines several years ago tried not to put a disproportionate number of students on the free lunch plan in any one school — to help ensure that they and their classmates would be able to get the instruction they needed. But even that criteria was abandoned when the system started shuffling students around on maps last year.
The board decided this week not to redistrict, but redistricting will be back on the table soon when the board finalizes lines for the new Shive Elementary in the eastern part of the county. The school board needs to set clear criteria for the Shive Elementary redistricting and those that follow. It’s not just about filling schools; the system should also strive to assign students in a way that spreads out the teaching challenges.
Some school board members bristled at the suggestion that students be identified and reassigned based on the “at risk” label. But if you’re not going to put students where the resources they need are, then you have to be willing and able to put resources where the students are. So far that hasn’t happened. All people are created equal, but all students do not have the same instructional needs.
Almost half of all the students in the system — 48 percent — receive free or discounted lunches, up from 39 percent in 2001. There is no haven from poverty in the public school system. Koontz’s 75 percent rate is high, but other schools also have high rates and have had them for a long time. They’re used to it. The faculty and staff at Koontz were caught off guard by the high degree of need in their student body, and they had not been prepared or equipped for it.
Next year, they’ll know.