01.31.07
Price: School-boundary panel failed to hear parents
Price: School-boundary panel failed to hear parents
BY ROBERT PRICE, Californian columnist | Tuesday, Jan 30 2007 11:50 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, Jan 30 2007 11:57 PM
Public outrage gets results. Elected officials pay attention, as well they should, when people start lining up at the microphone to speak. When almost all of them are saying the same thing, the decision becomes almost inevitable.
People certainly spoke with one adamant voice at the packed school-boundary hearings hosted by the Kern High School District. The most contentious issue at those meetings, held in November and December, was placement of the border between Bakersfield High School and West High School.
Bakersfield High parents attended the hearings in droves. West High parents stayed home in droves. The BHS side — and I have to include myself here, in part because I’ve got two kids headed that way — wanted no part of a plan to take four middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods out of the ethnically and economically diverse BHS enrollment area. The West High side, represented by a comparative few (including, to their credit, a couple of West High teachers), liked the idea.
But these school-boundary deliberations were in the hands of a volunteer committee of 50 parents, administrators and assorted others — none of them, it’s important to note, answerable to voters.
Well, get this: The committee’s final recommendation is in, and the concerns of the hundreds of parents who showed up at those hearings to make their feelings known have been deemed irrelevant.
Those four neighborhoods are one step closer to moving into the West High enrollment area, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of engaged parents.
Did the committee give more weight to the feelings of all those West High parents who chose to stay home and watch “Sports Center”? We don’t know, because, with precious few exceptions, we don’t know how those parents truly felt.
Unlike vast numbers of BHS parents, who cared enough to understand the issues, take time out of their schedules, overcome their fear of public speaking, and get involved in the process precisely the way their obligation as parents demanded.
All for nothing.
At least that’s where it stands now. The boundary committee — created, ostensibly, to filltwo new high schools, the district’s 17th and 18th — has forwarded its recommendation to KHSD Superintendent Don Carter. He may accept the committee’s proposed boundary as is or make changes of his own. He will then forward his recommendation to the board of trustees, which will make the final decision in March.
The school district will first hold one more public hearing, probably in February.
But why bother? The boundary committee already held two public hearings. The public-opinion needle pointed decisively toward keeping Bakersfield High’s laudable socioeconomic diversity intact.
If the committee was just going to ignore all those people, what were the hearings for? Theater?
West High needs a boost, no question. The school, which once dominated the district academically the way Stockdale, Liberty, Centennial and BHS do now, is a shadow of its former self — largely because of gradual middle-class flight (and the loss of active, vocal parents) from West’s stagnating older neighborhoods.
But the boundary committee only considered one strategy that could meaningfully fortify the school — one that takes from BHS. Neighborhoods with desirable demographics in the Stockdale High and Liberty High enrollment areas are relatively close to West High, too. But a more equitable plan that restores West by appropriating from those and other relatively new schools never made it past the talking stage.
Instead, the committee opted for the pendulum approach, moving the same neighborhoods from West High to BHS and back again, hurting each school in turn.
Now it’s apparently Bakersfield High’s turn — to the detriment of the city’s central business corridor, which benefits from the presence of a strong, vibrant high school.
Everyone appreciates the need to fortify West High, but a demographic guillotine, in light of those one-sided public hearings, is patently unfair.
Government teachers: This might make a lively topic for classroom discussion. Turn your students loose and see how they feel.
At least then we can say some good came of what has been, to this point, a bewildering process.
Robert Price’s column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach him at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.
