FWCS Petition Color Battle for schools not students

Fort Wayne Community Schools repair battle has evolved into two camps. The fight is over a half of a billion dollars on schools on schools that educate the majority of African-American students, in the public school system. Camp one is code blue. Code blue sounds an alarm that the money would be better spent on improving students academic achievement.

Camp two is the yellow camp. Yellow sounds like a canary cautioning that the repair of the building will improve the learning environment and will be a beacon for improving students performance.

Which side wins? It depends on signatures.


Kevin Leininger writes.

Thirty thousand.

That’s the number of signatures opponents say they might need to defeat a $500 million school-improvement campaign. If they get that many, it would be a remarkable achievement. Probably even a record.

That's right the code blue name would need 30,000 signatures. Now we get to the meat of the problem. How are you going to get 30, 000 signatures when


Property owners are only allowed to sign the petitions.

Now according to the Allen County Auditor Office there are 91, 225 parcels in Fort Wayne that receive tax bills. But from households there could be an estimated 182, 450 property owners within the Fort Wayne Community School District.

Those it does not take a rock scientist to see that the estimate appears to suggest that at least two signature comes out of each parcels. Now we know that many couples are not marriage, but are living in houses as if they are married. Who really own the property, if the property is only in one name and the other person is signing it?

But even more troubling in bulking up the numbers of property owners to sign the petition comes from the fact that of the 91,225 parcels, 7,747 are businesses owners who can vote twice. Yet there are only 31,884 students attending Fort Wayne Community Schools. How many of these students parents are home owners? How many will of these parents signature will be missing from the petitions? Is it not these parents whom children are actually attending these schools? Do you think its these parents who do not want better and improved schools for their children?


But the signature must be collected within 30 days.

Not going to happen.

But, the increase in property taxes has already happened.

Why all the bellyaching?

Distraction. Property taxes are being increased and its been going on long before the decision to repair schools. But elected officials who are in charge of the budget express the need to prevent the tax payers from knowing they approve and sign off on the major tax increases by passing bloated budgets.

Home owners don't understand the elected officials are in their pockets, to insure jobs for their families and friends. Salaries and increases are in the budget, the elected officials just rewarded Mayor Dick a raise $130,000. Did that raise help improve students achievement? So home owners wrongly blame solely the school repairs for the tax increases.

Because the public schools have long been neglected, they are need of repair. And second with the mandates under No Child Left Behind, parents are able to remove their students from failing schools and placed them in other public schools. Nicer public schools in raced white neighborhoods.

Ese Isiorho reports

“As a large urban district, we continue to work hard to meet the accountability demands of the NCLB legislation,” Superintendent Wendy Robinson said in a statement.

FWCS is the second-largest district in the state, with nearly 32,000 students.

“AYP mandates spell success differently for large urban districts such as FWCS, which has to meet all criteria in 37 categories to be successful,” FWCS spokeswoman Debbie Morgan said in a statement.

Pleasant Center, Irwin, Harris and Waynedale elementary schools and Elmhurst High School missed making AYP because they fell short in just one subgroup.

As a district, FWCS has failed for the past four years to make AYP, but Robinson has said the district is attempting to improve student achievement. During FWCS’ last school board meeting March 26, she opened the floor for board members to discuss the district’s educational goals, which include accountability, leadership, focus and instruction. The board will meet periodically throughout the next few months to talk about specific topics in-depth.

“We applaud (NCLB’s) goal of success for all students,” Robinson said.

Some parents are not applauding NCLB and would rather see school closed than improved if that would mean their children would have to attend schools beyond their neighborhoods. Prometheus 6 blogs about

schools

segregated schools. Fort Wayne Community Schools have an enrollment of African-American students between 25-29% and 56 % raced whites. The African-Americans population is over 35,000 the estimated number of raced whites in the core of the city is probably 55,000. The boundary expansion has erased the city of Fort Wayne into other areas, which has reduced the African-American population to 8% and raced whites to 92%, as an estimation.

Segregated. They don't care if the schools caves in. That's one less school that their child will have to attend. And you thought it was about pretty buildings. Here sharing some G-itch stuff, here, and here.