Busing Iowa City students to achieve equity draws questions

IOWA CITY - The Iowa City school district faces some tough choices as it tries to more evenly distribute students demographically.

During the current redistricting process, the school board has said one of its priorities is to address the large disparity at schools in terms of the number of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a common measure of poverty.

The problem is especially acute at the elementary school level, where free-reduced-lunch rates range from the single digits at some schools to 65 percent at Wood and 66 percent at Twain.

To even those out, some neighborhoods will have to be reassigned to new schools, and some students almost surely will have to be bused away from their neighborhood school.

The conventional wisdom is that parents from middle-class and more affluent neighborhoods would resist having their kids sent to schools in low-income areas. And in fact, at a redistricting forum at Wood Elementary Monday night, one of the small-group moderators (I didn't catch his name), said they'd been hearing that at earlier meetings. Also, I talked with a man for an unrelated story last week who said he and his wife had moved into their neighborhood so their kids would go to Lemme, and under the boundary scenario being discussed, they'd be sent to Wood, something he opposes.

But Monday night I heard many Wood and Twain parents say they didn't want their kids bused away from those schools. They love their local schools and say any negative reputation the schools may have is unearned.

They also have serious questions about busing. For those poorest families, transportation is a major issue. Some of them don't own cars.

“If they miss a bus, how are they going to get to Lemme?” Royceann Porter said to me. Porter sends her children to Regina, a private school, but she's active in the southeast side and was speaking for many parents.

The same thing goes if a child needs be picked up early from school. Others asked how parents would get involved in the school, through parent groups or their kids' extracurricular activities, if they have problems getting to the school.

This isn't to say everyone is opposed to the idea of moving some kids around. Other parents said they thought it would be best for all students.

Last summer I spoke with Noga O'Connor, a visiting assistant professor of the sociology of education at the University of Iowa. She said studies show low-income students, and schools with more of those students, tend to perform less well on standardized tests than more prosperous students and schools.

It's not guaranteed, she said, but poor students should be better off in a school with lower rates of free or reduced-price lunch, and more affluent students probably would not be affected. 

"An affluent white student is going to be a strong student, almost no matter what," she said. "The black students, however, really benefit from attending those schools that have a more affluent population that have greater resources."