By Anonymous
Filed Tuesday, January 10 at 9:54 AM
by Peter Downs
January 8, 2006 –– St. Louis Board of Education is moving quickly to neighborhood children preference for admission to the magnet school in their neighborhood. A proposal to set aside 35% of seats in each magnet school for neighborhood children is expected to be on the school board's agenda on January 17.
Magnet school applications sent out in December already specified the new neighborhood preference. Discussion of the change on the "St. Louis Public Schools Watch" segment of Lizz Brown's Wake Up Call on WGNU, however, initiated some frenzied activity at the school board office. Board attorney Ken Brostron informed board members and the superintendent that only the school board had the legal authority to make such a change in the magnet school program. As the board had not approved the change, it was quickly placed on the agenda for the board's next administrative meeting.
The St. Louis magnet schools were created as part of court-ordered desegregation. The settlement of the segregation lawsuit requires that the school board maintain certain magnet programs until the year 2009.
Over the last two-and-a-half years, the school board has closed magnet schools on the north side of St. Louis and moved programs to the south side. Only six of the schools system's 28 court-ordered magnet schools remain on the north side, and five of those are within a handful of blocks of the tradition north-south border.
Sources within the school district's administration said that the idea of the neighborhood set aside is to attract more white students into magnet schools so that the district can expand the programs to serve more black students. The proposal is based on the fact that the overwhelming majority of magnet schools are located in white neighborhoods.
If the school board follows its normal agenda, the public will have a chance to comment on the proposed neighborhood set aside at the January 17 meeting.
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