When they finally figure out what’s going on, the folks in the suburbs are going to freak out. I mean, they’re going to just flat-out lose it. But by then, it will be too late. Their kids will be on buses, headed to inner city schools, where they’ll play a part in a large-scale desegregation effort.
It’s a fate suburbanites figured they could escape by buying homes in the nether regions of Mecklenburg County. In the half-decade since the courts ended busing for desegregation, they’ve begun to think of neighborhood schools — largely white neighborhood schools — as a right.
But they missed a key point in that court ruling, one that wasn’t lost on school officials determined to racially balance our schools. That ruling banned busing for race, not busing for space.
In the years since the ruling, school officials have been creating that space by deliberately overbuilding urban schools while suburban schools overflow. When you look at the numbers, which are staggering, there’s just no other conclusion you can draw. Although no one is willing to admit it publicly, today’s desegregation battle is being fought not in court, but with bricks and mortar.
At some point over the last seven years, needed urban school renovation turned into a frenzy of overbuilding. In the process, according to this year’s attendance numbers, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has created 11,600 empty seats in majority black urban schools and equity schools, most of which are also majority African-American and have large numbers of poor children. At the same time, largely white suburban schools are now over-capacity by 12,200 seats.
So far, school administrators have successfully blamed this on suburban growth and the fact that they accidentally over-projected the number of inner city kids by about 7,000 a few years back. Yet they continue to horde hundreds of millions of dollars in bond money, much of which will be used to rebuild, renovate and improve under-used inner city schools while suburban schools overflow.
Meanwhile, at the elementary level, there are now 7,768 empty seats at equity and urban schools, while suburban schools are overflowing by 4,100 kids.
There are 2,500 hundred open seats at equity and urban middle schools while suburban schools are 1,500 over building capacity. With about 4,500 new kids pouring into the system each year, many of them from the suburbs, the situation will only become more extreme.
This doesn’t appear to have been an accident. With the county mired in a record debt crunch, it will only take a few years for the politics of this situation to boil down to a simple set of undeniable mathematical facts. No matter how the empty seats in urban schools got there, as the school bond debt continues to pile up, it will be harder and harder to justify building new seats in the suburbs so suburban kids don’t have to fill empty urban ones.
This is why the school board has spent endless hours this year brawling over whether to build a handful of new suburban schools — totaling a mere 4,200 seats — the cost of which is miniscule compared to the rest of the system’s building budget. Though the battle is being fought with code words and political catchphrases, the bottom line is that every new suburban school seat built is a loss in the battle for a racially balanced school system.
To clueless suburbanites, the issue here is whether it’s fair that little Johnny has to go to school in a trailer. But to urban leaders, the issue is nothing less than the new front in the civil rights battle. They’ve seen how inner city schools have resegregated, and it scares them. That’s why they show up at school board meetings to protest every time someone suggests building new schools in the “burbs even though shiny new urban schools are half full. To them, every new suburban school is one step backward to the days before Brown vs. Board of Education.
Right now, this battle no one wants to talk about is at a stalemate. When African-American school board member Wilhelmenia Rembert lost her seat last year to more suburb-oriented politicians, the diversity contingent of the school board came up one vote short of being able to start filling empty urban seats by busing suburban kids. So they’re biding their time until the 2007 election while the few suburban leaders who’ve figured out what’s going on battle frantically to reverse the trend by building suburban schools as fast as they can.
Three weeks ago, after an angry meeting in which suburban mayors and politicians demanded more suburban schools, the school board voted to ask the County Commission for extra “emergency” money to build a handful of suburban schools, money everyone knew the cash-strapped Commission wouldn’t fork over. Suburban politicians, meanwhile, know they have to get their hands on the hundreds of millions in inner city school bond money the school board is sitting on, and redirect it toward suburban schools if they want to keep their “neighborhood school” notions alive.
The side that can grab the cash and build the fastest will win. Let the games begin.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2004.
