ANOTHER VIEW: DO WHAT'S BEST FOR ALL STUDENTS

Many parents in the city of Cape Girardeau are concerned about the proposed school boundaries for next year. As parents of children currently enrolled in Franklin Elementary School, we would like to raise a few issues and ask a few questions.

The map with the proposed elementary school boundaries, printed in the newspaper Feb. 24, does not provide enough information for the public to make informed judgments about it. The map included information for each school on the number of children who can be served in each school, the number of children who are tentatively designated to go to each school next year and the percentage of minority students slated to attend each school next year.

It would be useful to know the current numbers for making decisions about whether the proposed numbers are improvements or equitable changes. Current numbers for May Greene and Washington elementary schools should also be provided.

In a recent newspaper, the honor-roll students in each school were listed. The Clippard and Alma Schrader lists were far longer than any of the other four schools lists, and the May Greene list was so short it was not divided by grade. While we understand that Alma Schrader and Clippard schools mave many more students than the others (and two classes were left off the Franklin list because there were not sent in on time), we are nevertheless concerned about the inconsistent honor-roll numbers across the six schools. If the reason for this is, as stated by assistant superintendent David Giles (and supported by research), that family income and grades are correlated, then shouldn't income be a factor used in deciding school boundaries? Why then were race and capacity the two primary factors used to determine the boundaries? Socioeconomic status should be included.

Socioeconomic status information should be available to the school board, if not to the public. At the Saturday school board retreat, superintendent Dan Tallent mentioned that federal money is awarded to eligible schools based on their minority and socioeconomic status numbers, so this information is available. If family income is not accessible, then why was the number of children on free or reduced lunch not included? Why was the number of children expected to need remedial training or other special programs not included?

The boundary options were calculated by hand. Because this is labor intensive, it did not allow for multiple boundary options to be reviewed and presented to the public. Why wasn't all of this information computerized so that various plans could be quickly and easily examined and all corresponding information calculated automatically? All numbers could then be provided to the public very easily. A computer program could be written in a week's time that would do these calculations.

In addition, why were parents told at any time in the last two years that their school boundaries would not change? If boundaries still had to be considered before the new school opened, no parent should ever have been led to believe that some school boundaries would remain the same, while others were likely to change.

While we can appreciate the boundary committee's desire to move as few children as possible, we feel this goal is unrealistic and unfair when one-third of the city's schools are closing and a new school is being built in their place. Major changes such as these require that every school's boundaries will be affected. We feel the committee should have started with this premise. Although we support the attempt to maintain the neighborhood-school concept, that concept is not maintained when only the Blanchard Elementary School district is stretched from the far north to the far south of the city.

In the school board retreat Saturday, school district business manager Stephen DelVecchio was talking about budgets for each school building's maintenance next year when he said, "We've got two schools closing and a new one that's basically made up of those two." This apparent acceptance of Blanchard school's becoming a new May Greene-Washington school is counterproductive to enhancing education throughout the city. According to assistant superintendent Giles, desegregation consultants recommended that each school be within 10 percentage points of the city's minority population percentage. This means that because 25 percent of Cape Girardeau's children are minority, then each school should have 15 to 35 percent minority students. In the proposed boundaries, only Clippard (18 percent) and Franklin (23 percent) fall within this range.

Franklin school parents are also concerned about class sizes, especially in the kindergarten through third grades. Franklin currently is the only school over capacity, with 378 students and a capacity of 350, but other schools in the city also have large class sizes in the lower grades. Every kindergarten-through-third-grade class in Franklin has about 30 children in it. We feel that classes in the early grades need to be much smaller for optimal learning to occur, with no more than 22 students per class. The current policy of maxing out classes before switching students to an overflow school is not adequate and needs to be reconsidered in the contest of redrawing school boundaries.

However the final boundaries end up, we also are concerned about the fact that the new Blanchard school will be filled with the old furniture from May Green and Washington schools. No new playground equipment has been approved. When the school board went over its five-year budget plan in Saturday's retreat, no mention whatsoever was made of planning ahead for new furniture or playground equipment for Blanchard school.

In conclusion, we would like to ask parents from every elementary school district to consider what is best for all children in the city of Cape Girardeau, not just for their own district at the cost of all others. The boundaries should be divided so that all socioeconomic levels are equally represented at each school. Isn't it to everyone's advantage to make sure that the educational experience is just as rewarding for every child in the city? The public school children of Cape Girardeau all come together in the same school in seventh grade and will soon come together by the fifth grade. Their educational experiences up to that point should prepare all children equally well.

MARTHA and NEIL ZLOKOVICH

DEBBIE and MITCH ROBINSON

LORI SHAFFER and CHRISTOPHER GOEKE

ELIZABETH and MARK SEESING

LISA and SAM BISHOP

Cape Girardeau