Hoover school rezoning plan trades segregation by race for segregation by income, parents say

The rezoning proposal being considered by Hoover City Schools trades a legacy of segregation by race for a legacy of separation by socio-economic status, some Hoover parents told school officials Monday night.

Roughly 200 people showed up at Gwin Elementary School for the fourth of five community feedback meetings set up for people to voice opinions about the rezoning proposal laid out by Superintendent Kathy Murphy at the beginning of the month.

Numerous parents expressed concerns about how the proposed new school attendance zones would concentrate greater numbers of students from low-income families in certain schools, namely Green Valley, Gwin and Rocky Ridge elementary schools.

“We’re going to have the rich schools, and we’re going to have the poor schools,” said parent Denise Monti, an assistant professor in the biology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Hoover school officials have projected that the percentage of students from low-income families would rise from 43 percent to 48 percent of the students at Green Valley Elementary and from 28 percent to 39 percent at Gwin Elementary and from 38 percent to 39 percent at Rocky Ridge Elementary.

Meanwhile, the percentage of low-income students would be 6 percent at Greystone Elementary, 9 percent at Deer Valley Elementary and 11 percent at South Shades Crest Elementary, school officials project.

Green Valley parent Will Ramsey said he doesn’t understand why the poverty level at Green Valley has to be so high. He doesn’t understand why Hoover school officials are moving so many children in poverty to Green Valley and sending families with more resources to other schools.

Murphy said school officials are trying to correct past desegregation strategies that the U.S. Department of Justice and NAACP Legal Defense Fund no longer find acceptable.

In the past, Hoover school officials have tried to make sure schools were desegregated by picking up groups of students, usually in apartment complexes, and spreading them out among Hoover’s various schools. In the process, students in some apartment complexes were bused farther away from home for their education.

The Justice Department and Legal Defense Fund no longer find that practice acceptable, saying it has a disproportionate negative impact on minority students, Murphy said.

So now Hoover school officials are proposing to move those students back closer to their homes. The problem is that many of the apartment complexes in Hoover are concentrated in particular areas, loading up some schools with more lower-income students.

Ramsey on Monday night questioned whether the Justice Department and Legal Defense Fund really think that’s fair. “It appears to me it’s a segregation of poverty to a very few schools, not a desegregation,” he said.

Numerous parents said they welcome lower-income families in their schools, but they don’t think it’s a good idea to have them in such high concentrations if school officials can avoid it. It hurts the ability of parent groups to raise money for their schools, they said.

Plus, when teachers have higher concentrations of lower-income students, they often spend more time covering remedial work, which takes away from the advancement of other students, one mother from Gwin Elementary said.

Green Valley parent Rebekah Crossman asked if the same thing that happened to Trace Crossings Elementary would now happen to Green Valley, with parents moving their children into private schools because of the high concentration of students in poverty.

School officials are going to have to provide more resources for schools with more low-income families to give those students what they need to be successful, Crossman said.

“We need resources,” she said. “We’re sick of just getting by.”

And if the rezoning goes through as proposed, those resources need to be in place when school starts in August, Crossman said.

Murphy said she understands the need and realizes that federal Title 1 funding will not be enough. The Hoover district will have to use local money to help support those students, she said.

Monti said school officials also are working with faulty projections that underestimate the number of low-income students that will be entering in kindergarten. Because school officials don’t know how many kindergartners will show up next year, they are using demographic data from the graduating senior classes to account for kindergartners.

But the percentage of students in poverty is a good bit less at the high school level than it is at the elementary level, Monti said. “The projection models are entirely incorrect,” she said.

And Monti contends the issue is not about whether Hoover is providing resources for children. “This is about creating the diverse learning environment the Supreme Court has advocated for our nation,” she said.

A few parents also said the demographic numbers provided by Hoover school officials concerning rezoning were misleading because they don’t take into account the percentage of Hispanic and Asian students in each school. Hoover schools are really more diverse than it may appear because many of those Hispanic students show up simply as white students in the rezoning numbers, parents said.

Gwin parent Laura Jackman said Hoover school officials shouldn’t be so quick to eliminate the practice of sending some students to schools farther away from their homes if the distance and travel time is minimized and not burdensome. The U.S. Supreme Court has permitted that kind of school zoning in some instances, she said. She questions whether people in the apartment complexes really want to be rezoned to different schools, noting the disruption it would cause for them as well.

Lauren Honeycutt, a resident of The Preserve subdivision, which is being rezoned from Gwin Elementary to Trace Crossings Elementary, said the rezoning will put nine apartment complexes within two miles of their schools, which could mean they would no longer be eligible for school bus transportation unless they get a waiver from the state Department of Education.

Honeycutt questioned whether that would put an undue burden on those students who often rely on school buses to get to school.

Murphy said some residents of the apartment complexes have shared the same concerns and said that’s a valid point.

The superintendent said school officials hear the concerns being raised by parents and she will take those into account as she considers modifications to her rezoning proposal before she presents a final proposal to the Hoover school board around March 7.

She already has shared some potential modifications to her proposal with the Justice Department and Legal Defense Fund, she said.

The final community feedback meeting for her rezoning proposal is set for Tuesday night at 6 p.m. at Spain Park High School.

After that meeting, Murphy said she will meet again later this week with the Justice Department and Legal Defense Fund before releasing a modified plan in advance of the next Hoover school board meeting.

If the Hoover school board approves a rezoning plan, it then would be submitted to the federal court for its consideration. School officials hope to have a rezoning plan approved in time to implement it for the 2016-17 school year.

See details of Murphy's rezoning proposal here.

People also can find out more about Murphy’s rezoning proposal at hooverrezoning.com. The website includes school locator software that allows parents to find out which schools their children are proposed to attend by typing in their street address.