Worcester Public Schools take up rezoning

I have put off writing anything regarding about this until we had, really, anything to talk about. As a result of this past week's Governance and Operations meeting, we now have a report from Dillinger Research and Applied Data, with preliminary recommendations. I thought that MassLive did a decent job outlining the big points of what is in it (that link is via Yahoo! so is not paywalled); the T&G also did five takeaways. 

The rezoning work is being updated on this WPS page, and this map (which I urge you not to try to examine on a teeny phone screen!) is what they're looking at right now. That also allows you to give feedback.

And while I am sharing useful information up front here, the rest of what they're planning this fall for meetings is this: 

Here are some initial thoughts from me (as usual, speaking solely as myself).

We have the buildings we have.

Yes, we have built some new ones lately ('though in the same spots, if you noticed), but S-L-O-W-L-Y and, given how many buildings we have, not many. For the most part, Worcester has the school buildings it has, of the size they are, in the places they are. We deal with the reality we are handed.
That's how you end up with an elementary school in the old South High School. 

One of the two buildings that was South High, now Goddard Elementary.
picture from the Worcester Historical Museum...I mean Museum of Worcester

It's part of how the arts magnet elementary school is well back in a neighborhood school way over on one side of the city, and a now-dual-language elementary school at a junior high school building (on Chandler). We use the buildings we have, as we live with the reality largely handed down to us by other people, even as the students we use them for may change, both as those students change and as the district and the city do. 

Maybe that seems obvious, but it's worth stating. 

School districts have to do this from time to time.

There are people alive in the city who can tell you what it was like to attend high school in these buildings: 

Screencapture of Google Maps' image of 50 and 55 Salisbury Street
formerly North High School
They were North and South High Schools because of their places on Main Street.

It can seem, I think, somewhat removed when you go past those condos on Abbott Street or Elizabeth Street, but those were neighborhood schools that families sent their kids to, planned to send other kids to, went to events at, and otherwise lived lives as schools. Some of us even lived in this in the past twenty years, with the wave of schools that closed in the early 2000's; some of us had taken toddlers to playgrounds and talked about how some day, this would be where they'd go when they were big kids, only to find that the district had other plans.

Taken to its largest extreme, if we never rezoned or rebuilt, I suppose we'd still be sending kids to Jonas Rice's house up on Grafton Hill, or we'd still have a school downtown on School Street. We might still be using a high school on Walnut Street.

In the long history of public education in Worcester (at least in theory going back to 1669), we have had many buildings and many changes, as the city and as neighborhoods have grown and have changed. 

That may sound a little cold, but it is as far as can be from it: one of those who had family plans changed in 2006 was mine. At least this time, it isn't being done for budgetary reasons, and it isn't being done in what certainly felt like a rush, but it is being deliberately planned for using the resources we have in ways that best meet the needs of the kids we have. 

Worcester has had turf fights over schools for nearly as long as we have had schools.

(not, of course, that this makes us particularly unusual)

To quote from the brief history of the Worcester Public Schools that opens the report of the Exam or IB final report of 2013¹:

While a system of a mobile school of several months a year was then implemented, it was some years before Worcester, which by then had reached the state cutoff of 100 households, established a “proper grammar school.” The schools, mandated across the state under colonial law, were intended to prepare the sons of Worcester’s merchant class for entrance to Harvard. 6It was this school, established in the late 1730’s, that eventually became Boys Latin, then Worcester English and Latin High School, and finally Classical High School. The directive of the school--to prepare Worcester boys for Harvard so that they might follow their fathers into law, medicine, or the church--necessarily lent it a small, exclusive but influential group of supporters who periodically faced off against the majority of Worcester’s residents, many of whose children would never attend such a school and saw no need to pay for it. The specialized education needs or wants of some were resented and resisted by the many. 

That of course was after Worcester went through several rounds of breaking state law and being fined for not having a school at all.² 

Some of our current lines and names are a legacy of attempted desegregation.

 And here's the third rail of Massachusetts public education.

We do not have the arts magnet elementary school at a middle class neighborhood elementary school directly adjoining the largest public housing project in the city accidentally. We do not have legacy names offering technology and international studies and so forth because someone thought that was clever. I am not going to go into the history of it all here--in fact, I'd say that I don't know enough to be able to do that myself!--but that is a thing that happened.

Worcester's deisolation (as it was called) effort has died out decades ago, but we should not ignore it for two reasons:

1. Specifically on Worcester Arts Magnet, its location is no longer a function of its very existence, which matters.
2. For all schools, we should at least know, in a district in which elementary schools can have as high a concentration of poverty as over 90% and as low as the twenties, what impact changing lines is going to have. We should at least be sure we aren't making our schools even more economically isolated, even as Supreme Court rulings bar us from considering other factors.
   
   

If this is going to be done, it has to be done to better serve the largest number of students.3

Again, this should go without saying, but we're going to get arguments about people buying houses because of school zones, or that things have been a particular way for decades, or that a particular understanding was this way.

We're going to hear a lot from adults, and in many cases, we're going to get adult priorities.

We should be endeavoring to make sure that most kids attend schools that aren't overcrowded or underused. We should endeavor to make sure kids have a clear understanding of where they go next. We should do all we can not to preserve privilege or access or resources, particularly for those who are loudest. 

I know the Worcester School Committee is going to take hours of public testimony and they're going to get reams of emails. At the end of the day, though, this is an Edmund Burke moment⁴; Committee members need to make a choice not on what's popular, but on what's right for kids. 

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¹which I keep here; it appended a Worcester School Committee report that year, so it should be available in minutes, but we've changed linking conventions at least twice since then, so it would take hunting to find it. Should it matter, I wrote this text, so I'll vouch for its accuracy, as it is the result of several days I had the joy of spending time in the then-Historical Museum archives.
²This is my favorite "nothing new under the sun" story; see the earlier link on the start of the system, as covered in William Lincoln's 1832 History of Worcester, Chapter XV: "Education"
³To add another wrinkle: if they're going to be making the schools all in three tiers now as part of this, this is the PERFECT time to final change the high school start times to a scientifically backed sane hour by flipping the tiers.

⁴From his speech to the Electors at Bristol, 1774: 

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

The final sentence is often quoted on its own.