It was a bad day

Friday was a bad day in Orange County, not just because the children at our county’s two poorest schools had federal resources specifically targeted toward them suddenly taken away, but also for the premise of open and responsive local government.

Early Friday morning the Orange County Board of Education pushed through an entirely new plan for "dealing" with the disparities between Central and Hillsborough Elementary schools. After spending months coming up with a disastrous merger plan, the Board spent just about two hours coming up with the new plan.

It is amazing how quickly you can get things done when you schedule meetings when most interested parties cannot attend, and you don't feel the need to gather any community input.

Newly named Board Chairman Ted Triebel must be proud that he accomplished in two hours what Dennis Whitling couldn't get done in months - too bad for those parents and children crushed beneath the boot of Ted's efficiency.

First, and foremost, in the Board’s plan is the “redirection” of federal Title 1 funds, currently being spent on remedial reading teachers at CES and Efland-Cheeks, to the creation of a county-wide Pre-Kindergarten program at CES. This program will be open to any child in the county, but the District has no plans to provide transportation for the program. So, the only ones who will be able to attend are those who can either walk to the school or afford to drive there every morning. Wait, wasn't HES criticized for just such a situation when this whole discussion started last spring?

The true goal behind this redirection of funds, is to remove the ability of parents at either “failing school” to opt out and send their children to better performing schools. In essence, hiding the black eye of the county’s failing schools under a coat of makeup without actually doing anything to help the most vulnerable students. Not only are those children losing federal funding earmarked specifically for programs at their struggling schools, but the Board has found a way to ignore that they exist at all.

Next, all children in Kindergarten through 2^nd grade at HES will be forced to reapply for their spots at the school next year. Attendance from any one school zone will be capped at 20% of that zone’s elementary school population. That means some HES children could be forced to leave the only school they have ever known. Once every Free and Reduced Lunch child who applies is admitted, the remaining spots will be awarded to other applicants based on a lottery. After all, the lottery has been such a success for funding our schools, why not use it to assign people the schools also?

The least discussed part of the plan will have the widest county-wide impact. Ted’s new plan includes one apparently innocuous bullet point aimed at helping CES meet its SES balance goals:

• "Ensuring strict adherence to transfer policy"

What this means is that the District will rescind the ability of parents to apply for transfers from one school to another unless there is an “extreme hardship.” While that may not sound like a big change, it becomes one when you look at the number of children currently attending schools outside their zones.

As of last February, 123 elementary students were attending schools under the previous regular transfer policy, and every school in the district had both transfers in and transfers out.

I seriously doubt the parents of these 123 children ever thought they would become victims of this Board’s myopic arrogance, but I’d like to welcome them my world.

Like I said back in July, "So, if you think the current discussions about HES, CES and Efland-Cheeks don't involve you, you may be right - but probably not for long."