Gerth: Get rid of countywide magnet schools like Manual, and you'll end JCPS busing woes

If you really want to know how to solve Jefferson County schools’ bus woes, here’s how you do it.

You get rid of countywide magnet and traditional schools and replace them with regular schools that draw from the communities around them, and you create regional magnets that allow for local kids to attend.

You take kids from Old Louisville and Schnitzelburg and the St. Joseph’s neighborhood (where I grew up) and send them to Manual, like you used to, instead of busing them to Iroquois High School or wherever.

Sending those kids across the city does nothing to promote diversity, and it did everything to require more bus drivers and to make it more difficult to get students to class and home on time.

You let the kids in the small city of Lynnview walk the less-than-a-mile to Male High School instead of busing them to Seneca. You let kids in the near East End go to Brown. And you allow the kids who live within walking distance of Butler to hoof it there each morning rather than be shoved on a bus and forced to go somewhere that doesn’t have the exalted status of “traditional” before its name.

Perhaps, the rule needs to be: “If you can walk there, you can go there.”

Yep, I know what I’m proposing is radical. It’s going after not just a sacred cow, it’s going after three of the four cows that are producing all the milk for Jefferson County Public Schools.

What do I mean?

Just last week, U.S. News & World Report released its list of top public schools in Kentucky, and three of the four Jefferson County schools in the top 10 were magnet schools – duPont Manual, Male and Brown. The other one was Atherton, which is in a wealthy part of town and has an international baccalaureate magnet program.

So, why would we want to change what’s working?

My question is “working for who?”

Brown requires applicants to provide test scores, grades and recommendations from teachers and then go through an interview process before they're admitted. Manual requires students to submit grades, test scores, a series of recommendations from teachers, people in the community and others.

Just 23% of kids at Brown and Manual qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. In contrast, nearly 87% of the kids at the Academy @ Shawnee do.

These kids at Brown and Manual are going to succeed no matter where they go to school. It makes you wonder if Manual and Brown are good schools because they teach kids so well or because they select kids so well. It’s likely some of both.

Male gets its students from a countywide lottery pick, but until recently, it benefitted from its ability (unlike non-magnet schools) to kick out kids who weren’t cutting it grade-wise or who had disciplinary problems – essentially pawning its troubles off on other schools.

Instead of keeping these exclusive ivory towers that serve largely those with money, let's open them up to the hoi polloi, the commoners, the masses.

That’s the really ridiculous thing about state Rep. Kevin Bratcher’s neighborhood schools plan. His goal is to let kids go to their neighborhood schools, but it excludes the magnets. His “neighborhood school plan” draws a wall around nine high schools, nine middle schools and 11 elementaries and tells the kids who live around it, “You don’t qualify.”

That's got to be great for their psyches.

If you can walk there, you should be allowed to go there.

And no more schools that draw from the entire county (except for maybe a couple of small specialty schools like the teenage pregnancy program). If we need two of everything, do it. Let's go with magnet programs within larger schools instead of having magnet schools.

School administrators will tell you that it’s not “best practice” to do this – that having wall-to-wall magnet programs in schools where all kids are on the same learning track is the smart way to operate a school. That may be so, but I can’t imagine it’s best practice to have a goal of getting kids home from school by 7 p.m. either.

If you live outside of walking distance – say a mile or a mile and a half – we can let the school board assign a school or group of schools where you can send your children like it does now.

So, here’s what we do.

We replicate Manual’s college prep program somewhere in the East End, like maybe Waggener, and send kids in half the county there. And we send kids from the other half of the county to Manual, and by doing so, we shorten bus trips. We allow the neighborhood kids into Manual so they can see how the other half lives. We think of doing the same at Valley.

Manual actually has five magnet programs including the Youth Performing Arts School and a Journalism and Communications program that could be replicated elsewhere, as well.

If it’s really the “traditional school” program that makes Male such a good school and not the kids selected to go there, let's look at using that model in more of the high schools beyond Male and Butler.

We look at magnet school programs that are working in one location and try to replicate them somewhere else, and we divide the county into two or three zones and send students to one of two or three schools rather than just one, and we reduce their travel time.

These schools were created as a reaction to busing and a cave-in to white parents the school district was afraid would yank their kids out of JCPS and send them to private schools because they shared former Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus’ view of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling.

(It was Faubus who sent Arkansas National Guard troops to keep Black students out of Little Rock Central High School after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled schools must be desegregated.)

Here, when parents learned they couldn’t keep Black kids out their schools after U.S. District Judge James F. Gordon ordered the schools desegregated, they figured they could at least choose which Black kids their kids would share classrooms with.

And the magnet schools were born.

Overall, 39% of students in the Jefferson County schools are white and 37% are Black.

At Brown, 67% of students are white and just 20% are Black. At Manual, 50% are white and just 19% are Black. A whopping 19.3% are Asian, according to the Kentucky Department of Education.

JCPS doesn't bus kids to Brown − it relies on all parents to get kids there, which puts poor kids at a tremendous disadvantage even if they have good grades and pass the interview process. If we opened that school up, kids who live up to a mile away, teens in the Phoenix Hill and Smoketown neighborhoods would be able to attend.

So here we are, all these years later with a school district that is divided into the haves and have nots.

Let’s stop that as well.

Except for the magnet programs that, for whatever reason, must have higher academic standards for admission, let's end the process where you have to apply to schools and show you’re worthy to attend.

Kids who go to the Youth Performing Arts School have to audition to go there, which puts kids whose parents can afford to send them to private singing or dancing lessons at a huge advantage over the poor kids who just dream of one day being on a stage. We ought to be able to teach advanced and regular kids in the same school, shouldn’t we?

And there you have it.

Radical? Sure.

Will it ever happen, probably not – we’re addicted to being able to point to Manual and take credit for the smart kids being smart as if they, their upbringing, their wealth and their natural God-given abilities had nothing to do with it.

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Get rid of countywide magnet schools, and you'll stop JCPS bus woes