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One of the things I'll be watching for is how the attendance boundaries are drawn for the three high schools. The two high schools are already grossly imbalanced in terms of students, and have been since Darby's first year with four full classes (1999). Click on the chart below to see the detail. As published in the 2006 Comprehensive Annual Report (p.123), Darby has 17% more students than Davidson, and is 510 students over capacity. That same report shows Davidson as being 174 students over capacity. Note that being 510 students over capacity means that Darby has more than a whole extra grade's worth of students.
Add to this that the associated middle schools show a similar pattern. Weaver (Davidson) houses 757 students out of a capacity of 800 (95% utilization), while Heritage (Darby) houses 820 out of a capacity of 800 (103% utilization). Memorial MS, which feeds both high schools, houses 724 out of a capacity of 800 (91% utilization). The new HS + MS campuses can each house 2600 students. Why is that the Darby/Heritage campus houses 3,130 students while the Davidson/Weaver campus houses 2,731? Please also read the discussion about the elementary school utilization. What does the racial and economic demographics of the two schools look like? I have asked that question before, and never been given any response. A reader has directed me to an excellent source to try to answer these questions: The Ohio Department of Education school Report Cards. Here are the report cards for the Hilliard Schools. My analysis of these data can be found on the page titled Demographics. The Hilliard City School district serves neighborhoods in several municipalities and townships, including the City of Columbus. In the southwestern portion of the school district lies the Hilliard Rome Rd commercial corridor, which is lined with a number of apartment complexes. Many of the immigrants pouring into our community, especially those who come from poverty and inadequate schooling in their homelands, are finding homes in these apartment complexes. One in particular, Bayview Commons, is primarily occupied by African and Latino immigrants. I celebrate the arrival of these immigrants to America and to the Hilliard community. But we help neither them nor our country if we fail to balance the cultural diversity across all of our schools. In plain language, we cannot allow the new high school to be place where all the immigrant kids end up being concentrated because of either explicit segregation, or by simply failing to think about this issue... ...because it will end up creating exactly the same kind of situation that led to busing in Columbus City Schools. Update June 2, 2006: Attached is a copy of a one page property assessment used by Hilliard City Schools, which was acquired through a document request. In this case, the property in question is the land owned by COBA, just south of I-70 at Alton-Darby Rd. Under the "CONS" side of the Pros/Cons table, the last comment is "Diversity issue for the district may be a problem." What does this mean??? It seems like it is an acknowledgement that the 'natural' attendence areas for a school in the southern part of the district may have a racial makeup that is different than the other Darby and especially Davidson. We must pay attention to this! How do you feel about this? Post you comments on our blog. |
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