Some leaders want race factored into Palm Beach County school boundary shifts - Sun-Sentinel
In the Palm Beach County School District, where several schools have student bodies that are almost all of the same race and poor, board members have started asking whether the district should consider racial diversity as a factor when it draws and adjusts attendance boundaries.
"I do believe in diversity and I don't believe we can get there if we don't look," school board Vice Chairwoman Debra Robinson said during a recent discussion with the committee that advises the district on boundaries.
Robinson asked district officials to look into how to add a school's racial diversity to the list of considerations the Advisory Boundary Committee can use when determining whether to recommend a change to a school's attendance boundary.
Board members Marcia Andrews and Karen Brill also said the district should consider race and socioeconomics when determining attendance boundaries.
School board member Jenny Prior Brown said board policy already allows the committee to consider socioeconomic diversity, but it is the lowest priority on the list.
Advisory Boundary Committee Chairwoman Cinthia Becton said the board does not look at the racial makeup of a school when making recommendations on boundary changes.
"We start and end with capacity. That is the driving force," Becton said, explaining that the main factor in every boundary recommendation is how to keep a school's enrollment below 110 percent of its capacity.
For schools in high-growth neighborhoods, that typically means boundary changes are needed to send students to a different school, Becton said.
The Palm Beach County School Board throughout the 1990s took measures to increase racial diversity, including busing children to schools outside their neighborhoods and moving teachers to avoid having mostly black staffs at mostly black schools.
Those actions, as well as racial-balancing goals to make all coastal schools no less than 6 percent and no more than 40 percent black, came as the result of a 1990 agreement with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.
The federal agency had accused the district of effectively resegregating schools.
The racial quotas for schools established as a result of the agreement with the federal government were dropped in 1995, and the plan was repealed in early 2001.
Some schools, such as John F. Kennedy Middle School in Riviera Beach, are more than 90 percent black. The school had 11 white students last year out of 688 students, according to district reports.
West Riviera Elementary School was 87 percent black with only five white students out of 550 total students last year.
At the other end of the spectrum, Jupiter Farms Elementary School was 81 percent white last year.
Becton said the district's approach in the 1990s "quite frankly didn't work," and she has concerns about considering race in determining school boundaries.
She said the committee will look closely at what has been tried before and come up with a clear and specific recommendation.
The best recommendation, Becton said, might be to continue looking at capacity and not consider racial diversity because what most parents care about is not race or money but sending their children to a school close to home.
Committee member Rose Anne Brown, Robinson's appointee to the boundary committee, said it made her "very uncomfortable" to discuss using race in determining school boundaries.
"It shouldn't matter what their race is. It shouldn't matter what their parents make," Brown said.
Robinson said she has no interest in returning to the days of busing children to increase racial diversity and is not suggesting going back to those policies.
Robinson said she doesn't think it would be legal to make boundary changes based solely on the racial makeup of a school or a neighborhood.
She would like to see the racial diversity of a school used as a "tiebreaker" in deciding whether to change a school's attendance boundary to keep it under capacity.
"If all other things were equal and the board had the choice of increasing diversity or decreasing diversity, I would hope we would choose to increase diversity," Robinson said.
Becton said there is no deadline for the committee to return with a recommendation on adding race to the list of factors.
"This one has to be treaded very carefully," Becton said.
18 Sep, 2011--
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