Gross mismanagement.  There is simply no other way to describe the job done by the officials charged with operating the government schools in Huntsville.  Every taxpayer in the city should take note and demand changes.

On Sunday and Monday the Huntsville Times ran a two part series about how the two year old K-8 school in the tony Providence subdivision is badly over crowded while six nearby elementary schools are at less than 50% capacity.  The story is quickly mired in issues of race, exclusivity, and, most of all, poor planning.

First let me set the stage for those of you not familiar with Huntsville.  The school in question is in a fancy planned community called the Village of Providence that is well outside my price range.  Some of the smaller single family homes in the community start at $500,000 and the apartments above the swank dining establishments start in the mid $200’s and reach into the $800’s.  Needless to say the community is quite affluent, although I would hazard a guess that many are extending themselves to the breaking point in order to keep up with the Jones, but that is a different story.  The development is only about 10% complete (about 1,000 more housing units are expected) and growth nearby is expected to be explosive in the near term.

With that bit of formality dispatched, let me pose a hypothetical situation.  Let’s pretend that you and a friend went into business together and bought a factory.  At first things are going great, but after a few years demand for your products starts to slacken a bit and you find your factory is operating below its capacity.  Let’s say you’re only able to run it at, I don’t know, 61% capacity.  If your cohort in the enterprise then came to you and suggested that you build another factory while continuing to operate and maintain the first, would you:

A) Say, “Sure, it’s only money.”

B) Smack him in the back of the head and call him a moron.

If you said A then you probably had a hand in the mess that Huntsville’s government schools are in.

Obviously I didn’t grab the 61% number out of thin air.  That is the amount of classroom space that is currently being utilized in the Huntsville public school system.  The system is capable of accommodating 37,000 students, but ended last year with only 22,615 enrolled.  Some might say that this is a great situation to be in - classrooms are relatively spacious and the system is well positioned to handle the influx of BRAC transferees.  Except that the situation is not great.  Some schools, including Providence, are seriously over crowded while others use less than 40% of their space.  And the surplus of capacity is not due to exceptional preparation for BRAC, but rather it is the result of an exodus of students from the city to the County.

Even a business school flunkee could figure out how to cure Huntsville’s problem.  Sparsely populated schools should be closed.  District lines should be redrawn.  The last thing that needs to be done is constructing more schools while existing ones sit nearly empty and under-maintained.  Closing unnecessary schools saves the city (e.g. the taxpayers) money.  Redrawing district lines may upset some parents (Who moved my cheese?!), but as I understand it the goal of government education is to educate children not placate parents and we’re frequently told that low student to teacher ratios are beneficial.  Adjusting district lines to match shifting demographics allows the system to maintain an equally low (or high, you pick) student to teacher ratio at all schools.  Building new schools without closing old ones is akin to applying a band-aid - to the wrong arm.

But the leaders of Huntsville’s schools refuse to succumb to reality and common sense.  Sure, they floated the idea of closing a school recently.  But that wasn’t to save money or increase efficiency.  They suggested it as a first step towards building a Taj Mahal school in Madison County Commissioner Bob Harrison’s district if he voted to raise the sales tax rate so that Huntsville could get more money even though they already have more than they need.

A cursory glance at the district map for Providence and six nearby schools shows the extent of the poor planning.  The geographic expanse is huge.  Portions of the school zone come within blocks of existing schools, which forces some kids to ride a bus for 30 minutes rather than walk to a nearby school.  The school board, which can best be described as four morons and Jennie Robinson, knew full well when Providence was being constructed how much growth was already planned for the area.  They foolishly drew the zone far to the east of the school - crossing over Research Park Blvd., which is a major north-south thoroughfare - and maxed out capacity from the first day.  Remember: the six closest elementary schools operate at less than 50% capacity.  And here is where race and economics become a factor.

Four years ago, fearing a school near promised subdivisions would open with empty desks, faced with political cries that a new school would unfairly favor the affluent and white, the school board decided Providence school would not reflect too precisely the families buying homes in the planned community of the same name.

Instead, the board pushed the zone line east into older neighborhoods, gathering children from aging apartment complexes where rent is based on income, stretching so far as to rezone children who live only three-tenths of a mile from an older city elementary school or middle school.

How noble!  Stupidity for diversity’s sake.  They succeeded.

Last year, 55 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch based on low family income, and 55 percent of the students were black.

Supposedly the school was built as a way of attracting development in West Huntsville.  Mission partially accomplished.  But here is the million dollar question (almost literally).  How successful do you think the developer will be at wooing people who can afford to buy quarter million dollar homes if their children will be zoned to attend an overcrowded school where a majority of the students are poor?  Right or wrong, if something isn’t done growth will slow and home prices will suffer.

Again, the problem is poor leadership from Dr. Ann Roy Moore and the Board of Education.  Why isn’t Huntsville building new schools in the poor areas, if they must build new ones, or at least maintaining the existing schools to a standard that even a middle class community would find acceptable?  The older schools around Providence look dilapidated.  I most certainly wouldn’t send any of my children to them.  Building an overly ornate school in an affluent community while you allow others to rot away in plain sight certainly creates a perception problem.  Their moronic solution of busing in the poor kids is a pretty sorry mea culpa.  Now that the deal is done the school “leadership” (and I use that term loosely) says that a 37-year-old federal desegregation order block them from redrawing the school borders in a way that might upset the existing racial balance.

It’s worth it to take the time to read through the Times’ articles.  They cover a lot of ground that I didn’t even touch on: discipline issues at Providence, a black parent proclaiming that she doesn’t want her child at an all black school, and some serious tension between Mayor Loretta Spencer and Superintendent Moore.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Education, Government Waste, Huntsville. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.