David Glaser wasn’t in St. Louis three decades ago during the height of public opposition to the region’s first interdistrict school desegregation program. He’s learning about some of the old outcry as emotions rise in St. Charles County where the Francis Howell District is preparing to take students wishing to transfer there from Normandy.
Francis Howell is acting in the context of a state law requiring districts to educate students wishing to transfer out of unaccredited school systems.
Normandy, which is unaccredited, has chosen Francis Howell as the receiving district of choice, agreeing to pick up the transportation costs for those students wishing to transfer there. Normandy won’t pay for transportation to other accredited districts in the county or an adjoining county.
The coming influx of students from Normandy hasn’t pleased some in the Francis Howell district, notes Glaser, CEO of the Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corp., which oversees the voluntary desegregation program.
“Some of the staff that have been part of the organization for a long period of time tell me it’s a little bit like déjà vu,” he says of the reaction in Francis Howell. “When the program was initiated back in the early 1980s, there were similar concerns from districts and families.”
He and others say the region has learned lessons from that first school transfer experience even though the reason for the latest transfers is different.
“The program we started (in the 1980s) was an integration program. It was put in place in response to a federal court order to give black students access to better academic programs,” Glaser says.
The new program isn’t race-based, Glaser says. “It doesn’t matter if you are African American, Caucasian, Asian or whatever your ethnic background. If you live in an unaccredited district, you are entitled to attend a school in an accredited district.”
However, the student population of the Francis Howell District – located in the southeast corner of St. Charles County – is 87.4 percent white. The Normandy School District is 97.6 percent black.
Referring to the current opposition, Glaser says, “You have to measure the noise and recognize that sometimes the folks that make comments are not necessarily a sample of the entire community.”
Among those offering broad praise for the new transfer model is Susan Uchitelle, the first director of the St. Louis voluntary school desegregation program. The program’s goals included boosting the percentage of black students attending predominantly white schools in the county and upping the number of white county students enrolled in city schools, especially through the magnet schools program.
Normandy and some other county districts were excluded from that program because they already had high percentages of minority students.
“It may be the next phase of desegregation, by including those districts that couldn’t participate,” Uchitelle says. “Allowing students in those districts to have opportunity to participate in school choice is a very good thing.”
She said that the one big lesson of the original program was the way it “led to more integration between African-American and white students, not only in schools but long after graduation.”
Others praising the new model were more cautious.
“It’s a mixed bag,” says John Wright, an author who has been a superintendent in several area districts including Ferguson-Florissant and Normandy. “Normandy and Riverview have no choice because the law says in schools that do not meet accreditation, the kids can leave.”
Wright worries that this development might worsen the plight of unaccredited districts because “those students who are leaving tend to be among the best and have parents who tend to be more active in school activities.” Those left behind, he says, include low-performing students who might have been motivated by those transferring from the district.
“We have to look at the long range of what happens to kids, whether they will be successful if they transfer,” Wright says. And if they are problem kids, will they end up back where they ran from?”
Glaser also is concerned about how this transfer program will affect students left behind in unaccredited districts.
“Not all of the students are going to transfer,” he says. “The unaccredited districts are going to have to pay out huge sums of tuition to the accredited districts. It will have a huge financial burden on those districts and ultimately on the kids who remain in those districts.”
He says the issue raises a question of whether “there is maybe a different and better solution, such as providing resources to those districts to get them accredited.”
Edited for length and reprinted with permission from stlbeacon.org.