Redistricting and Inman Middle School

The Superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, Erroll Davis, Jr., is unflappable in the video, as he speaks with an engineer's precision.  "We have 10,000 middle school students," Mr. Davis said.  "We can't put 10,000 students in Inman and Sutton."  Although many of the issues associated with redistricting in APS have been decided, the capacity issues at Inman have been not.  There had been a proposal to have the Inman 6th graders attend a different school and only have the current Inman campus house the the 7th and 8th graders.  That was unpopular with many families whose children attend Inman as well as the neighborhood where the 6th graders would go, where they (1) wanted to keep their school open, and (2) didn't want kids from outside their neighborhood to come there when their children couldn't attend the school.

Tonight the Virginia Highland Civic Association is sponsoring a meeting at Inman to discuss the issue.  Nominally the meeting is about criteria for evaluating proposals for addressing capacity, rather than solutions to the capacity issue; I've seen similar notices of meetings in other neighborhoods.  I hope it's a good discussion and some good ideas emerge.  But I am not too optimistic that this public engagement approach will lead to a solution that shares the pain equitably - there are too clearly winners and losers, with underutilized schools with lower test scores that could take more kids, but families whose children attend schools with better test scores don't want their children sent there, especially if the better current school is closer to their home.  (Disclosure:  my kids went to private school after Morningside Elementary.  We could have sent them to Inman but did not.)

Inman could house more students if half attended in the morning and half in the afternoon (good luck with that), or if schools did like employers do who don't have room for everyone had let the kids with good grades telework (good luck with that one too).  There's no room on the current site to build out, although I understand they are adding trailers as a temporary solution for the 2012-2013 year; maybe they could do what intown homeowners do when when they don't have enough room and build up.  Maybe Inman could be 4 stories tall.

I've been reading some of the comments on Maureen Downey's blog on this topic from back in March, when the 6th grade academy idea was briefly on the table.  It's pretty depressing, and largely was focused on the contextual issues of race and socioeconomic status that make this so difficult, and recurrent suggestions that one or another elementary school -- one other people's children attend -- be zoned to another middle school.  That was pretty much it.

Mr. Davis is right - half the middle school students in the city cannot attend Inman, and right now there is not room at Inman for all the children in the 5 elementary schools that are currently planned to feed into the school.  Either capacity at Inman has to increase or fewer students have to come there.  One issue Mr. Davis raised in the interview was to bring back magnet schools.  How about a magnet school as a second middle school in the Grady cluster?  It couldn't be done overnight, but it could be done.

Mr. Davis is as best I can tell making a heroic effort to manage the bad hand he was dealt, with the mess APS was left in, following the departure of his predecessor.  There are no easy solutions here and I'm glad it's not my decision.  More to follow, I'm sure.