Ky. Schools Unlikely to Change Policy

By Tom O’Neill

The decision by Cincinnati Public Schools this week to eliminate race and gender as factors in magnet-school placement ends a 32- year history in Cincinnati, but likely won’t impact neighboring schools south of the Ohio River.

Most Northern Kentucky public schools don’t have enough minorities to compel them to have such a policy, let alone to follow CPS’ lead.

One district that does have a sizable number of minorities, Covington Independent, achieves a degree of racial balance by focusing on economic need instead of race.

The district’s population is about 30 percent African-American. But about 78 percent of Covington Schools’ students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, loosely classified as “at risk” students.

The district seeks to limit each school’s enrollment to 450 students, with a minimum of about 300. Its goal is to maintain a fairly even percentage of at-risk students at each school.

There’s two-fold result:

The district is able to maintain a semblance of racial balance at each school, without its policy being specifically race-based.

The system allows the district to qualify for funding for its family resource centers at each school. Funding for such centers is tied to each school having a high enough percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch.

Additionally, the district believes its approach would any conflict with Supreme Court rulings on desegregation.

“So I think we’re ahead of the game,” Covington Schools Superintendent Jack Moreland said Wednesday.

On Monday, the Cincinnati Public Schools school board voted to eliminate race and gender as factors in magnet-school placement. That decision was prompted by a June decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled voluntary desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville were unconstitutional.

CPS’ plan was not as broad as in those two cities. Since 1975, it had used two priority lists for magnet admissions: one for African- Americans and another for everybody else.

Achieving and maintaining racial balance determined which list the district applied. The key to this week’s decision was to avoid challenges stemming from the Supreme Court ruling.

Most Northern Kentucky districts have too few minorities to employ a race-based policy, Erlanger-Elsmere Schools Superintendent Mike Sander said.

Newport Schools Superintendent Michael Brandt said his district doesn’t have enough minorities to warrant such a policy. Brandt has been superintendent for four years but prior to that, he was the longtime superintendent at CPS.

“They used to have an index, a formula used to determine a percentage of students and staff from the desegregation order,” he recalled.

“It was supposed to mimic the racial population of the school district.”

Originally published by Post staff reporter.

(c) 2007 Cincinnati Post. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.