Huntsville City Schools redrawing zone lines (Madison, Butler: real estate, condos, transfer)

[LCTMadison]

My mom taught inner city school kids in Birmingham for years at what was considered one of the "worst" elementary schools in the area at that time. She then moved to the Trussville area for her last years teaching before she finally retired from Clay Chalkville. As far as parent involvement in "lower income" schools....she will tell you that you are quite wrong from her experience. She had MUCH more parent involvement/concern at Barrett than she ever did at Clay. She KNEW if one of her kids acted up at Barrett that mom was going to come up there and whip that kid's butt....at Clay Chalkville, she could barely gets some of the parents in to discuss failing grades.
Before we moved to Birmingham she taught at Thompson Elementary in North Gadsden for YEARS....again, one of those "have not" schools...in fact, her entire career she had taught at "Title I" lower income schools.....and saw that while facilities were often better and such, the parental involvement and student behavior was NOT. Some of the stuff she could tell you about things that happened at Clay would make your hair curl.

Having wealth doesn't make one a better person.....

[macwell]

UPDATE: Huntsville City Schools Plan Public Forums To Discuss Rezoning Proposal | WHNT.com

Wardynski’s presentation and graphs of the proposed rezoning plan can be viewed here on the
school district’s website. (link here)



This report list rezoning for ALL school levels elementary, middle, and high schools

Huntsville City Schools Student Assignment Plan

Slide 5
To further desegregation and the sustainability of desegregation measures, the Board now seeks court approval for school attendance zone areas that will significantly expand diversity within attendance zones.


Slide 42
Assignment Zone Summary
•Morris ES:-Zone Reduced
– Butler Terrace zoned to Blossomwood and Jones Valley ES
- Remaining Morris zone assigned to Columbia feeder pattern
•Butler HS retired by June 2016
•Ridgecrest ES assigned to Huntsville High feeder pattern
•McDonnell ES:Retired June 2015
-Students assigned to Chaffee, Whitesburg and Monte Sano zones
•Hereford zone established by June 2016 and assigned to Jemison High feeder pattern
•Jones Valley ES: 100% of zone assigned to Huntsville High feeder pattern
•Whitesburg P8: 100% of zone assigned to Grissom High feeder pattern, zone realigned with Mt Gap P8

[CoreLysium]

And I thought I'd just tack this news story from today in here:
Alabama releases new list of 76 failing schools | AL.com

In a nutshell, the north Huntsville schools that were on the list still are on the list, and nothing new got added. Full list of schools is at the bottom of the article.

[bbcobs]

New terms "Feeder Pattern".. "Student Assignment Plan".. "Attendance Areas".. "Assignment Zone".. in the old days "rezoning" was "rezoning" no matter what name you slapped on it.

Redistribution of student populations.. interesting..lets watch property home values as 2015-16 year kicks in and 'reality' of the new school population reflects it's new education, crime, foot traffic, and overall neighbor community schools are lost.

Found current stats for a few of the schools that will be sufficiently changing and reflect a new student population from redistribution patterns.

McDonnell Elementary School (retired June 2015 to Chaffee, Whitesburg and Monte Sano zones)
Ratings and Reviews for McDonnell Elementary School in Huntsville AL - Zillow School Information
Rate-1/10
Student Ethnicities
Black, non-Hispanic 41%
Asian/Pacific Islander 4%
Multiracial 4%
Hispanic 39%
Asian 3%
White, non-Hispanic 13%
Native American or Native Alaskan 0.2%


Morris Elementary School (Zone Reduced -Butler Terrace zoned to Blossomwood and Jones Valley ES)
Ratings and Reviews for Louis J Morris Elementary School in Huntsville AL - Zillow School Information
Rate-2/10
Student Ethnicities
Black, non-Hispanic 59%
White, non-Hispanic 21%
Hispanic 17%
Asian/Pacific Islander 1% 3
Native American or Native Alaskan 0.9%
Asian 0.9%
Multiracial 0.5%

Jones Valley Elementary School
Ratings and Reviews for Jones Valley Elementary School in Huntsville AL - Zillow School Information
Rate-9/10
Student Ethnicities
White, non-Hispanic 85% 4
Asian/Pacific Islander 3%
Asian 2%
Black, non-Hispanic 12%
Multiracial 0.8%
Native American or Native Alaskan 0.4%
Hispanic 0.4%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander 0%

Blossomwood Elementary School
Ratings and Reviews for Blossomwood Elementary School in Huntsville AL - Zillow School Information
Rate -10/10
Student Ethnicities
White, non-Hispanic 85%
Black, non-Hispanic 13%
Hispanic 0.8%
Asian 0.8%
Asian/Pacific Islander 0.4%
Native American or Native Alaskan 0.2%
Multiracial 0.2%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander 0%

Whitesburg Elementary School
Ratings and Reviews for Whitesburg Elementary School in Huntsville AL - Zillow School Information
Rate 6/10
Student Ethnicities
Hispanic 8% 5%
White, non-Hispanic 53%
Black, non-Hispanic 35%
Asian/Pacific Islander 2%
Asian 2%
Multiracial 1%
Native American or Native Alaskan 0.3%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander 0%

S. R. Butler High School (retired by June 2016)
Ratings and Reviews for S. R. Butler High School in Huntsville AL - Zillow School Information
Rate 1/1
Student Ethnicities
Black, non-Hispanic 72%
White, non-Hispanic 14%
Hispanic 13%
Asian/Pacific Islander 1%
Asian 1%
Native American or Native Alaskan 0.2%
Multiracial 0%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander 0%

Virgil Grissom High School
Ratings and Reviews for Virgil Grissom High School in Huntsville AL - Zillow School Information
Rate-10/10
Student Ethnicities
Black, non-Hispanic 9%
White, non-Hispanic 82%
Asian/Pacific Islander 6%
Asian 5%
Hispanic 4%
Native American or Native Alaskan 0.7%
Multiracial 0.2%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander 0%

Huntsville High School
Ratings and Reviews for Huntsville High School in Huntsville AL - Zillow School Information
Rate-9/10
Student Ethnicities
White, non-Hispanic 74%
Asian 3%
Black, non-Hispanic 21%
Asian/Pacific Islander 2%
Hispanic 2%
Native American or Native Alaskan 0.4%
Multiracial 0.2%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander

[CoreLysium]

Here's the powerpoint: http://goo.gl/r4IrlI.
Man, page 9 is pretty telling about why Butler had to be put down.

[bbcobs]

Weekend talks, walks, thoughts

Why will anyone purchase a house based on the Huntsville school district now?

Huntsville home values have always been based on school districts (school reputation, test scores, team schools, etc) but now Huntsville neighbor schools will no longer provide this value when purchasing a home in Huntsville. Parents will now be forced to send their kids to 'redistributed' schools, they will start sending their kids to private schools, home schools, or find schools outside of the Huntsville city limits.

Why will anyone pay extra money for home values in say Jones Valley, Grissom, Blossomwood etc if they are going to have to pay extra money to not send kids to their own neighborhood school. Neighborhood schools will no longer provide the same value as in the past for Huntsville property home values.

How are all these kids going to get to schools on the other side of town? Buses? Tax dollars spent to bus all these kids across town to other schools? What a mess.

So people who purchased homes in say Jones Valley to have their kids go to a top rated 'neighborhood' safe school (walking/bike distances) now get to pay taxes for Butler Terrace (and other 'outsider') kids to be bused across town to Jones Valley, where now the 'redistribution' of the student population will take over their neighbor schools. The redistribute of their neighborhood school 'education", crime, discipline, supplies, team sports like track, volleyball, cheerleading, band etc and let’s not forget uniforms.

School uniforms, wait, next required school uniforms for all schools, can't have a 'redistribution' of school population and keep a gap between haves and the have-nots.

[LCTMadison]

You can thank the federal government

[CoreLysium]

Yeah, by all means, bbcobs, let's keep the poor uneducated.

(that's sarcasm)

Anyone who is against educating poor children (who didn't cause the poverty they live in btw) must have some great plan to make things better that I can't imagine. Please, do tell.

[LCTMadison]

So it should not be about making every school better for ALL HSV kids?

For me, shuffling kids around to mix up demographics doesn't solve the real issue that HSV has created a very distinct "have" and "have not" mentality in their school system. Why shouldn't kids that go to Johnson have just as good of an education as the kids at Grissom? You improve the schools and the education the kids are getting, you will improve the area/community those schools are located in.

[CoreLysium]

Absolutely.

I think the replacement Johnson, which I forget what it is called, hopefully should make the kids realize that an education is important. More importantly, maybe some of the better teachers will end up there rather than the dregs of Huntsville's horrible "pass the lemon*" problem.

Realistically and politically, Butler had to be closed asap. A 31% graduation rate spells out decades of poverty and crime** for the area, and I don't just mean the Butler school district. Trying to keep the poor kids in an epic failure of a school is like feeding stray cats. It's not a good analogy, sure, but it produces about the same result.

The thought that having the previously poorly educated coming into Grissom is somehow going to steal the knowledge away from the kids is foolishness. Sure, Grissom might have it's numbers dip. But the goal of education is not to have good school numbers, it's to produce useful people who can be neutral or better to society, the economy, etc.

If you like more goventment welfare, then by all means, don't give them a chance at a better education. If you feel we need a slave class to run our Taco Bells and Hardee's, it'd still be cheaper to not have to pay the ones that get pregnant or don't stay sober welfare.

*pass the lemon = if you're a good teacher, you're rewarded by being moved up to a good school. if you're a bad teacher, you're demoted to a bad school. The good schools get better (Challenger, Mt Gap, Grissom, Jones Valley) and the bad schools get horrid (Butler, every elementary school north of University.)

**(not that poverty causes crime (though crime does cause poverty))

But, nope, I don't know how to fix everything. But closing Butler needed to be done. There was no choice, and frankly, the kids that lucked out by having Grissomland extend into their area were handed a golden ticket. Let's hope they do something with it.