Jefferson's challenge

Racial imbalances in the Cape Girardeau School District have left one elementary school teetering on the edge of a federal violation and students there struggling to keep up on state-mandated tests.

The situation at Jefferson Elementary School is exactly what some Cape Girardeau parents said they feared would happen when the district redrew attendance boundary lines in 1999.

Jefferson's minority enrollment numbers have seen major increases since the district closed May Greene Elementary School, located at 1000 Ranney St., in 1999 and shifted the majority of students there to Jefferson, several blocks away at 520 Minnesota Ave.

Between 2001 and 2002, Jefferson's minority student population went to 48 percent from 45 percent of the total enrollment. If the trend continues next year, minority enrollment would reach 51 percent, a violation of federal guidelines that prohibit minorities making up more than half a single school's population.

Meanwhile, student performance on the annual Missouri Assessment Program tests at Jefferson and the district's other four elementary schools show significant disparities.

MAP scores are part of the district's state accreditation requirements, and the scores at Jefferson have declined steadily since the 1999 redistricting.

Superintendent Mark Bowles said Jefferson's minority enrollment may be higher than other schools in the district, which has 26 percent minority enrollment overall, but he believes the imbalance has no effect on the quality of education there. He said the district has poured additional resources into the school through Title I federal funding and made sure that the level of teacher experience there is comparable to other schools in the district.

Court involvement

But some segregation experts stress that schools with high minority enrollments are at a disadvantage. For that reason, the federal government has guidelines to limit minority enrollment in individual schools.

According to Dr. Charles I. Rankin, director of the Midwest Equity Assistance Center, federal guidelines require that minority enrollments at schools don't exceed 51 percent. "Make no mistake, it is a violation when a school district causes an influx of students into one individual school," he said.

Rankin investigated segregation complaints at May Greene Elementary School in the early 1990s. The Midwest Equity Assistance Center, based in Kansas City, Mo., is one of 10 regional desegregation assistance centers funded through the U.S. Department of Education.

Rankin said once minority enrollment exceeds that percentage, a school is considered "racially identifiable" and is susceptible to court-ordered desegregation efforts. In some racially identifiable schools, federal judges have ordered busing and magnet schools in an attempt to attract a greater racial mix of students.

In the past, Rankin said, schools that exceeded 51 percent minority enrollments were automatically flagged by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights. But now that doesn't happen unless a community member files a complaint.

Research by organizations like the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University shows schools with higher minority enrollments receive fewer resources and employ less qualified teachers, which often translates to a substandard education for students.

The project has spent years researching the effects of segregation in public school systems. Earlier this year, the organization released a study which found that schools across the country became increasingly segregated during the 1990s -- a process researchers called "resegregation."

"Research has shown that schools with high minority populations are highly correlated with high poverty rates, which tends to translate to fewer resources," said Chungmei Lee, a CRP researcher.

Harvard's study, which sampled 185 school districts with enrollments larger than 25,000, found that virtually all schools analyzed showed lower levels of interracial exposure since 1986.

Lee said although the CRP has not studied every school in Missouri, it has found that its research applies to all schools, regardless of size, in other states.

"When you have a highly segregated school, you're putting minority students in a situation where they're receiving an unequal education," Lee said.

In her opinion, Lee said, the fact that the minority population at Jefferson is almost double the districtwide minority population makes the school "pretty segregated."

"We've found that schools with higher minority students tend to do worse, not because it's inherent, but because there are fewer resources available," Lee said.

Integration history

Integration has been a frequent issue in the Cape Girardeau School District over the past 30 years.

In 1975, the Office of Civil Rights through the U.S. Department of Education investigated civil rights violations at May Greene Elementary School, where minority enrollment exceeded the legal limit of 51 percent.

In 1993, May Greene was again cited for violating enrollment limits with a 64 percent minority population.

At that time, school officials were warned by the Midwest Equity Assistance Center that the district was in violation of the U.S. Constitution's 14th amendment -- which prohibits states from denying any citizen equal protection under the law -- and therefore susceptible to potential lawsuits and court-ordered desegregation.

In 1999, May Greene and Washington elementary schools were closed and Blanchard Elementary School opened. At that time, the district reconfigured attendance boundary lines in hopes of balancing the minority enrollment at individual schools.

As part of those efforts, the Attendance Area Study Committee, a 15-member group of parents and school administrators charged with redrawing the lines, established two major redistricting goals:

No elementary school would be racially identifiable with a minority population of 50 percent or more.

All schools would have minority populations between 15 and 35 percent to be within 10 percentage points of the district's overall minority population, which at that time was 25 percent.

Based on the new boundary lines, the committee projected minority enrollments at each elementary school: Jefferson, 38 percent minority; Alma Schrader Elementary School, 10 percent; Blanchard Elementary School, 36 percent; Franklin Elementary School, 23 percent; and Clippard Elementary School, 18 percent.

In the past three years, the minority population has climbed to 48 percent at Jefferson; 12 percent at Alma Schrader; 45 percent at Blanchard; 31 percent at Franklin; and 25 percent at Clippard.

This year's kindergarten class at Jefferson Elementary actually has more minority students than white students, which indicates the trend isn't likely to change in the next few years.

'Less representative'

Dr. Steven Trautwein, who chaired the Attendance Area Study Committee and now serves on the Cape Girardeau School Board, said he was surprised by the minority imbalance in the district's elementary schools and considers it a problem.

"The last thing that this or any district needs is to have the federal government tell us how we should go about the business of educating our children," Trautwein said.

Trautwein and other school board members receive school-by-school enrollment figures collected by the district every September, but those numbers aren't presented as percentages.

The fact that the enrollment percentages weren't readily accessible may be a contributing factor to the problem, Trautwein said. And while he is concerned about the racial imbalance, he doesn't think Jefferson's minority enrollment has diminished its effectiveness.

"I firmly believe our students are best served when they are educated in a milieu that reflects the society in which they live," Trautwein said. "As a school's population gets further away from the minority percentage of the entire district, in either direction, it runs the risk of becoming less and less representative of the society it serves."

Kathy Wolz was one of the parent representatives who served on the Attendance Area Study Committee and admits the group's plan wasn't perfect.

"With the way the population in Cape is distributed, it was hard to draw those boundary lines and not bus children a long distance, which nobody wanted to do," Wolz said. "As a result, the mix probably wasn't as good as it needed to be as far as economic status goes."

Wolz said part of the problem in 1999 was the boundaries hadn't been examined for several decades. Because of that, radical changes were necessary.

"I think everybody left knowing it wasn't the end of this. We knew it was going to have to be periodically changed," Wolz said.

Similar composition

Under the reconfigured boundary lines, most of the students who attended May Greene were shifted to either Jefferson or Blanchard elementary schools. Consequently, those two schools now have the district's highest minority enrollment.

Between 1999 and 2000, the year the boundary lines were changed, the minority enrollment at Jefferson more than doubled to 181 students from 73.

The only other elementary school to see any increase in minority enrollment from the redistricting was Alma Schrader, with a 22 percent increase between 1999 and 2000. Both Clippard and Franklin saw decreases in their minority enrollment numbers that year.

At the time the redistricting occurred, many parents complained about the possibility of busing their children just to balance the racial disparities.

The school board eventually approved a plan that, for the most part, allowed parents to keep their neighborhood schools intact, although it did little to improve the racial imbalances among the five elementary schools.

"I don't agree with the schools being divided up so unevenly," said Judy Owens, who has two grandchildren attending Jefferson. "But I wouldn't want my kids or grandkids bused across town just to balance out the mix."

She believes having her grandchildren attend the school with the highest minority enrollment in the district has been more of a benefit than a detriment.

"Hopefully their years at Jefferson will be an asset to them when they go to the middle school, where all the nationalities will be together," Owens said.

The school district saw a complete grade reconfiguration this year with the opening of a new high school with grades 9-12, a junior high for grades 7-8 and a middle school for grades 5-6. The middle school took its two grades out of elementary schools. Shifting the students to new buildings did not solve the racial imbalance in the elementary schools, however.

While the 1999 boundary changes affected the minority enrollment at each elementary school, some of the current racial imbalance can be attributed to voluntary housing patterns.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination in assigning students to schools. However, the law does not require that a district have the same number of minority students at each school.

"I wish the minority enrollment was 25 percent at each school, but it's a matter of housing," said Mark Cook, principal at Jefferson. "It's not perfect, but you can't tell people where to live."

Cook has been with the Cape Girardeau School District since 1980. He taught at Franklin for 17 years, served as assistant principal at Alma Schrader for one year and has been principal at Jefferson for the past five years.

"This is the most diverse school in the city," Cook said. "Having the mix is the best thing for kids."

"If you talk to the same type of people everyday, you get a skewed vision," Cook said. "If you talk to people from different walks of life, you get a real-world education. These students are getting a real-world education."

Lowest MAP scores

The benefits of that education are not evident in the school's performance on the annual MAP tests.

In both 2001 and 2002, Jefferson scored significantly lower in every MAP test subject than the district's other elementary schools.

School administrators say there is no correlation between Jefferson's high minority population and the school's low MAP scores.

"Their color has nothing to do with it. That's not the reason the kids are doing poorer on the MAP tests," Cook said.

Instead, administrators say the low scores are linked to socioeconomic status. Financially, Jefferson is the poorest school in the district.

The district measures socioeconomic status through the number of students eligible for free and reduced lunches, which is based on family income. For instance, students in a family of four with an annual household income of $33,485 or less qualify.

In 2002, 70 percent of Jefferson's third graders and 78 percent of the fourth graders who participated in the MAP tests were eligible for free or reduced lunches.

Blanchard Elementary's financial situation was similiar with 79 percent of the third graders and 62 percent of the fourth graders who took the MAP in 2002 on free or reduced lunches.

Despite the socioeconomic conditions at both schools, Blanchard's MAP scores are considerably higher than Jefferson's. In fact, Blanchard students performed as well as students from the districts' wealthiest elementaries, Alma Schrader and Clippard, in several subjects on the 2002 MAP tests.

Assistant superintendent of curriculum Cathy Evans said Jefferson's low MAP scores might also be attributed to a high population of students with learning disabilities.

"Thirty-one percent of the fourth-grade students at Jefferson last year had a learning problem and therefore would not be expected to do as well," Evans said.

At Blanchard, 22-percent of fourth-graders were listed as having learning problems.

Jim Murphy, whose son is a second-grader at Jefferson, said he feels the lower MAP scores may be due to a lack of parental involvement associated with low-income households.

"I don't think parents are spending enough time with their kids after school," Murphy said. "I've noticed a lot of our son's classmates' parents don't take an interest in education."

April Snider's son is a first-grader at Jefferson. She said she didn't know Jefferson's MAP scores were the lowest in the district. However, her son won't be involved in MAP testing until third grade.

Snider said she believes academic performance is connected to household income.

"The neighborhoods around Jefferson have really gone downhill in the past few years. It's gotten a lot trashier," Snider said. "I've found that the worse the neighborhoods, the worse the kids do at school."

Finding the solution

Whatever the cause, school administrators say they've been working for several years to close the achievement gap between Jefferson and the other schools.

Funding from federal programs like Title I -- aimed at improving reading achievement -- has allowed the district to provide Jefferson with additional teaching assistants, materials and technology.

Cook said the school has added teachers and teaching assistants to lower the student-teacher ratio to 16-to-1 and has implemented an after-school tutoring program aimed at improving MAP scores.

"Harvard's nationwide study says fewer resources are available to schools with higher minority enrollments. We've done handstands to make sure that doesn't happen at Jefferson," said Cook.

Frank Ellis, a black administrator who taught at May Greene and served as principal for six years at Alma Schrader, said he didn't see a problem with the high minority population when he taught at May Greene because the school received more funding.

Ellis said when he transferred to Alma Schrader in 1996, he was amazed at how little technology that school had in comparison with May Greene.

School administrators say that is the case now at Jefferson. Because the school is receiving more resources, administrator said, the racial imbalance doesn't pose a problem and the district isn't currently considering any measures to equalize the schools.

However, if the minority population at Jefferson continues to climb, the district may be forced to consider taking action.

School board member Trautwein said, from his experience on the Attendance Area Study Committee, he can think of four ways to solve the imbalance: Redrawing the attendance boundary lines, busing, developing a magnet school or reconfiguring the elementaries as attendance centers.

"None of those options is very good. Right now, I don't know what the best answer is," Trautwein said.

cclark@semissourian.com

335-6611, ext. 128

Cape Girardeau's schools

The locations and boundaries for the city's five public K-4 schools.

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