A Times Editorial

Choice challenges

In Pinellas: While the charter school issue remains a stumbling block, many details of the choice plan need to to be filled in before the public can be expected to pass judgment.

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 28, 2000

Two years after it rejected an agreement to relax racial ratios in Pinellas County schools and asked a federal judge instead to end all court-ordered busing, the School Board finds itself increasingly tied up in unitary knots.

The latest is charter schools.

Though fewer than 100 of the school district's 110,000 students are now being served by charter schools, some board members are so headstrong about charters that they seem willing to ignore the warnings of U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday. The judge has said he doesn't want charter schools to be used to circumvent the desegregation goals that are part of the new choice student assignment plan. His concern is a legitimate one.

The board has tentatively approved the charter for a new 750-student middle school, Bay Village Center for Education, that is to be located in an area of south St. Petersburg that could draw white students away from new public schools being built in nearby predominantly black neighborhoods. Though the Bay Village plan is incomplete at best, and was approved on a fractured 4-3 vote, some board members seem willing to put the cause of one unproven, unopened charter school ahead of their broader responsibilities under the three-decades-old court order.

The reaction of school Superintendent Howard Hinesley last week was understandable. "Somewhere, we're going to have to make a decision that (being freed of court supervision) is what we want," he said. "This is frustrating as heck."

And the charter fight is only the beginning. The school choice assignment plan has been released to schools across the county, but, as those schools and their School Advisory Councils get ready for summer break, the district has done little to fill in the blanks. In fact, with the most contentious issue of all -- whether families who live close to a school will have a better chance of their children attending the school -- the choice plan offers only a vague formula. Says the plan: "Spaces will be assigned using a system that begins with the application with the lowest home-to-school distance number and continues to the next highest number until 35 percent of the available spaces are filled."

How many "available spaces" at each school will be used for purposes of proximity? And what will 35 percent look like in the neighborhoods surrounding a school? Will it cover two blocks surrounding the school or a half-mile? Though administrators argue that the formula will change the proximity boundaries from one year to the next, the district owes schools and neighborhoods a realistic view of what 35 percent will mean. Administrators have the information necessary to draw the possible proximity boundaries for each school, and they should. Otherwise, the schools and the surrounding neighborhoods are left in the dark.

Board members have tried to silence the concerns of families who feel allegiance to their zoned schools by offering a "grandfathering clause" that would let their school-aged children stay at those schools -- elementary through high school -- for as long as they live in their current homes. But NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Enrique Escarraz has opposed the clause, and it is uncertain whether a judge will accept it. In any event, the board should want a proximity rule that is acceptable enough to families that it can endure well beyond any transition period.

As the students and faculty get ready for a well-deserved summer break, Pinellas school administrators promise to keep circulating information about the choice plan. Realistically, though, they cannot expect organized school groups to participate fully during the summer, and the School Board would be wise to set up listening sessions as soon as schools reopen in August. As the board members have discovered during their animated debates over charter schools, the details do matter. For choice to truly work, students and parents and teachers and communities are going to have to embrace it.

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