Citing an increase in school suspensions, declining academic performance, and unequal economic opportunity, a group of Garner citizens pleaded with Wake County commissioners during a public hearing recently to help the parents get “the attention of the school board” about student reassignment and school construction issues.
Since 2001, Wake County school reassignments have left Garner schools with some of the highest percentages of free-reduced lunch students in the county. Residents said they wonder why they must shoulder a disproportionate burden of free-reduced lunch students.
The number of students receiving free-reduced lunches in Garner schools are: Aversboro Elementary at 56.4 percent; Creech Road Elementary at 61.8 percent; East Garner Middle at 50.7 percent; North Garner Middle at 55.8 percent, while many other county schools are well under 30 percent.
When asked whether these percentages reflect the demographic composition of Garner, Mayor Ronnie Williams said that he and other town officials “have provided data to the school board to show that Garner does not have a high percentage of poor residents.” He said school officials have pointed to the “34 percent of non-Caucasians in their community,” but U.S. census data from 2000 shows the percentage of families in Garner earning below $25,000 a year at fewer than 20 percent.
Paul Capps, a Garner real estate agent and citizen group organizer, said the school board has largely ignored citizen concerns for over five years and, in some cases, for more than 10 years. School board members have assured Garner citizens in both written communications and at meetings that they will address the issues, but their actions show otherwise, Capps said.
For example, the group has shown the school board that the high percentage of free-reduced lunch students in Garner schools violates State Board of Education and Wake County Public School System policies. A WCPSS report (Baenen, 2005) said that the purpose of reducing the percentage of free-reduced lunch students was in response to a “large body of research indicating that students learn better in economically heterogeneous school environments than in high poverty schools.”
The same report set school-level caps for reassignment decisions at “no more than 40 percent of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch” and “no more than 25 percent of students performing below grade level.” Yet the school board continues to reassign free-reduced lunch students from other parts of the county to Garner.
At their April 2 meeting, Capps thanked the commissioners for being the “watchdogs for the Wake County Public School System,” but he said, “something is wrong when you go to work sessions and nothing has been looked at.”
He said their concerns include “equal educational opportunities, not just in Garner, but in Wake County as a whole.” Capps told the commissioners that, in recent years, “3,334 families have opted out of their base schools in Garner” because of dissatisfaction with school quality. The families have chosen home schooling, magnet and charter schools, or have moved to Johnston County or other areas outside of Garner, Capps said.
The group said reassignments have led to a decline in SAT scores and academic performance. Before 2001, SAT scores at Garner High School had been rising. Since then, the scores have been declining, and the school is on the state’s ABC turnaround team list. In 2006, 45.1 percent of all students at Garner High School scored at or above proficiency. By race, 37.3 percent of blacks and 57.8 percent of whites scored at or above proficiency.
After presenting the figures to commissioners, Debra McHenry, a Garner citizen, told the officials that “we cannot afford for there to be two different levels of public education” if Wake County is to compete in the global workplace. McHenry asked, “Will you become a partner in policy as well as finance?”
The high ratio of free-reduced lunch students has also created other problems. Williams says that as the ratio of free-reduced lunch students has increased so has the number of calls from teachers who complain about “not having the time to spend with students requiring special attention in the classroom.” N.C. Department of Public Instruction data show that the average number of short-term suspensions per 100 students has increased in Garner High School compared to the district, 37 versus 26.
The group believes that “community schools foster parental involvement,” and research shows that parental involvement is an important ingredient in student academic achievement. David Williams, another Garner citizen, cited attendance data showing that students from a small part of eastern downtown Raleigh are being sent to 11 middle schools, many of them in Garner and most of them free-reduced lunch students.
“Community schools are an ugly word to the Wake County School Board,” Williams said. “We don’t need more schools in Garner. We need a policy on how to assign students.”
To that end, the group asked the commissioners to reject the school board’s request to purchase land to build a new Garner high school north of U.S. 70. Town officials and citizens oppose the decision on the site because that is not where most of the county’s growth is occurring. The school board voted to ask the commissioners to approve the land purchase, even after Williams and others had presented them these data and asked them to reconsider.
After being ignored by the school board for years, members of the group said they decided to solicit help from the commissioners. Should that and other efforts fail, they said, their next step may be to take legal action.
Karen McMahan is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.