I've been traveling to all the neighborhood elementary schools this past week with the Kealing Jr. High principal, assistant principal, and parent support specialist - talking about the PTA and the big changes coming this next school year. This is Mark Henry's Jr. High - which is becoming a middle school next year- meaning that the district is adding a 6th grade to the 7th and 8th. There has been all kinds of debate - is this good for 12 year olds, is this bad...
Kealing is a tense place - right in the heart of East Austin, poorest part of the city, and it is home for the AISD Jr. High/Middle School Magnet Program - meaning that kids in the district who are 'super bright, really gifted and talented, etc. " can get a college prep education in science, math, and language arts at Kealing Jr. High, but no other.
I guess the idea behind Magnet Programs is that they are a way of desegregating districts - a way of encouraging the upper/middle income families in the district to send their kids to a school whose feeder schools are all in very low-income neighborhoods, i.e. lots of distress, crime, and low performance. Of course, the outcome is not integration, but a campus where the inequities and tensions around class and poverty and race and ethnicity in Austin are all intensified, resulting in a place of distilled strata - a place where it is quite clear where there has been privilege, opportunity, resources, etc. and where there has not - and where the percentage of neighborhood kids who get into the Magnet Program (there is an application process that is not unlike college entrance stuff) is heartbreakingly low.
My rambling - no particular point other than I am moved by the fact that there are people like you and M trying to be extra resource, extra voice and push and opportunity and community. So much homicide and loss in so many forms...
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Kealing is a tense place - right in the heart of East Austin, poorest part of the city, and it is home for the AISD Jr. High/Middle School Magnet Program - meaning that kids in the district who are 'super bright, really gifted and talented, etc. " can get a college prep education in science, math, and language arts at Kealing Jr. High, but no other.
I guess the idea behind Magnet Programs is that they are a way of desegregating districts - a way of encouraging the upper/middle income families in the district to send their kids to a school whose feeder schools are all in very low-income neighborhoods, i.e. lots of distress, crime, and low performance. Of course, the outcome is not integration, but a campus where the inequities and tensions around class and poverty and race and ethnicity in Austin are all intensified, resulting in a place of distilled strata - a place where it is quite clear where there has been privilege, opportunity, resources, etc. and where there has not - and where the percentage of neighborhood kids who get into the Magnet Program (there is an application process that is not unlike college entrance stuff) is heartbreakingly low.
My rambling - no particular point other than I am moved by the fact that there are people like you and M trying to be extra resource, extra voice and push and opportunity and community. So much homicide and loss in so many forms...
- aga 2-26-2004 4:16 am