Post city council meeting

I'd assume it'd be pretty easy to chase down whether there is, in fact, a disparity in the number of students heading into the public high schools from public middle schools among the four city quadrants. Worcester has always had a population of students that leave the public schools at middle school to go to private (often Catholic) high school. Is that in fact increasing? And is there any disparity between Burncoat, North, South, and Doherty?

The perception that there is a funding disparity may in fact be a result of the Darwinian system the city has set up for the schools with lack of adequate funding. When cuts are made in things schools need, be that people to staff the library, paper for writing, or a copy machine, in the schools where the parents' income and time allow them to do so, parents (and parents' groups) have stepped in to fill the gaps where they can. And so we have ink cartridges brought from home, a copy machine leased by the parent-teacher organization, a library staffed by parents. The problem is that not all schools have parents that can do this. Most city schools don't. And so those schools go without, and have to meet the daily needs of their students with only the funds the city provides.

We are setting up a two-tiered system in which the schools with parents with a lower income level and less time bear the brunt of the funding cuts in a way that the schools with parents with higher income and more time don't. And that's, of course, completely contrary to the great leveller of obstacles that publicly funded education is supposed to be.