Mini-Rant: The Neighborhood Schools
One of our early Minnesota tasks after moving was getting our kids transferred to local schools. We don't do private schools, so we transferred them to the neighborhood public schools. Upon moving, we started meeting neighbors and asked them about the schools.
They told us "it's really... diverse".
Now, the school is definitely ethnically diverse (only 5% of the students at the high school are white). The whole neigborhood is diverse. We have the majority of the Spanish-speaking residents in the city located here in our neighborhood. That diversity is one of the reasons we wanted to live here. We're pretty sure they were talking about the economic diversity, but that doesn't change the message. They think the wrong types of kids go there, and that fucking sucks to hear grown ass adults say that about kids.
Here's the extra interesting part. They don't send, and they haven't sent, their kids there. Not a one of them has first-hand experience of the schools or its staff. They chose to send their kids outside the district based on hearsay.
My wife sent me the wikipedia page for our local high school, Humboldt. It stated from a 2006 Star Tribune article that only 30% of high school students in the neighborhood attended Humboldt, and only 37% of the students at Humboldt are from the neighborhood. I wanted to see if any of this data is still true. I pulled up the 2023-2024 district data on what neighboorhoods each school's students are from. Our neighborhood has four schools. One is a Spanish/English Immersion school. One is a magnet high school. It has a specialized cirriculum. The other two are the stock standard public schools where I send my kids.
The enrollment of kids in our neighborhood from all four of those schools is about 643. That is about 42% of all the 1549 kids in our neighborhood that attend public school. The rest go to schools elsewhere in the city. For high schools, the biggest destination seems to be the nearby Highland Park.
Humboldt had 935 students last year. It's the second smallest high school by enrollment. Of those, only 276 were from the neighborhood (about 30%). The rest are from other neighborhoods. Now, some may see that as a positive. They could take it to mean that parents from other neighborhoods want to send their kids to Humboldt. That is not the case. The students from other neighborhoods are sent to Humboldt either because there is not enough room at their neighborhood school, or their original school didn't want to deal with the student. 88% of students are from low income families, and 42% are English learners (meaning, English is a second language).
This makes the bar for providing a quality education to these students rather high. People ofetn forget that schools are only part of the equation for learning. Family life has a rather hefty affect on a student's ability to learn. Do they have a stable home life? Do they have a place to live and study? Are they getting enough sleep and nutrition? Are they getting the familial support they need? Involved parents make for better students, and lower income students might not have that.
Either way, none of this convinces me to change schools for my kids. I've visited the school, and I've spoken with the teachers. They are enthusiastic about teaching, and some have been there for decades. I've asked my kids about their teachers, and I got back positive remarks. Not something that could have been said of their teachers back in Indiana.
The thing I'm seeing is that the school got a bad reputation however long ago, and it stuck. I don't think the school is bad. The teachers and staff go out of their way to make learning accessible. At the open house there were school ASL interpreters all over. One of the Assistant Principals was hunting down a language interpreter for a student's parent that spoke a different languange than the six for which they were already prepared. If anything, what I saw at the open house made me feel better than the open houses where I just came from.
Plus, this would be the second time my kids went to a school with a bad reputation. Our elementary school back in Indiana had the nickname Stinkin' Lincoln because the town thought it was a terrible school. The reality is that the school sat in a lower income neighborhood, and the detractors assumed that their poor opinions of poor people applied to the school as well. From my own experience, the school was fantastic. I knew every teacher and staff member. They were fantastic and passionate.
I'm obviously just a parent peering from outside the education system. I don't know the details and complexities of running a school. However, it seems like if all neighborhoods just kept the local students in the local schools, scores and reputations would balance out a bit. It wouldn't be perfect. There are some rich neighborhoods in St Paul and some poorer ones, but people might find that Humboldt is a better school than they thought.
A quick addendum, I know there are very good and valid reasons to send your kids to another school. Several of St Paul's public schools are for specialized learning, and it would obviously make sense for some students across the city to attend those schools to their benefit.