Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Editorial: A challenge for Roanoke schools
Forest Park parents need to pick their battle: Save a school or save the students.
From the RoundTable blog
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Forest Park Elementary School parents remain at odds with the Roanoke School Board, so much so that they have filed a federal discrimination complaint. And they continue unrealistically to plead with Roanoke City Council to do something -- anything -- to force the board to abort plans to turn their building into a school for overage students. Council has scant authority over the board.
Passions run high when change is foisted too fast on a community -- as regrettably this decision had to be. But when a system fails to graduate nearly half its entering freshmen classes, it would be gross negligence for the board to delay implementing a program that could dramatically turn that around.
Forest Park parents should understand more than most the need for a school that caters to academically struggling students. Their children attend a school that repeatedly failed to educate all its students. Still, it stings that their building is the one to be sacrificed.
It's easy to feel sympathy. From their perspective the school board swooped in uninvited, commandeered their neighborhood school for interlopers and will oust their children, busing them to three other elementary schools. Adding to the insult, the administration insists Forest Park is a failing school, a concept parents either brush off as inaccurate or blame on a system that withheld resources, like a full-time reading specialist.
They believe there is a decades-long pattern of discrimination against Northwest schools, and they have filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education. It will take time for that action to run its course.
In the meantime, Roanoke officials must continue with plans to convert Forest Park to an academy for students who are older than their classmates and at grave risk of dropping out of school. And they must deliver on promises to ease the disruption to Forest Park students, adding whatever resources are necessary.
Concerned parents should reconsider where to direct their efforts -- saving an elementary school that repeatedly falls short of adequate yearly progress or demanding that their children be given the best education city schools can offer.
While parents seem at odds with the board, both sides appear motivated by the same ideal: providing equitable education to all students. Roanoke can't get there without dramatic changes. Forest Park is just the first of many to come.
