Title: Durham School of the Arts: A Journey form "Hole" to Whole.
Abstract: DSA made a successful transformation in five years' time from one of Durham's least desirable schools to one of the district's most desirable programs of choice. Ms. Jirtle describes the factors that account for that success. SIX YEARS ago, Durham High in Durham, North Carolina, was just another downtown school whose glory days as a flagship of excellence and community pride had spiraled down to a dreary existence as an unsafe campus with an untenable educational program. Its dwindling student population was paralleled by its dwindling course offerings. Among the students who remained, many were out of control. A water fountain could be seen dangling from the wall to which it had been attached. Student suspensions from school were high. School morale was low. A series of principals had struggled to hold a program together. Valiant teachers had little of themselves left to give. This year, 500 applicants were unsuccessful in the lottery for admission to the same campus. This is the story of one community's quest for a better school ' for a school that would be better because, for the first time in its 75-year history, it would belong to the entire community. The Durham High of 50 years ago was the place to be if you were a white American and wanted to get a strong academic or vocational preparation for adulthood. In subsequent years, school desegregation and economic changes occurred simultaneously. Jobs in the city's textile and tobacco factories declined as technical and service jobs increased throughout the Research Triangle (Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill). As job opportunities and residential areas expanded in the suburbs, more and more middle-class families ' both white and black ' moved out of the city of Durham and into the county. Hundreds of cities throughout the U.S. experienced a similar outward migration of commerce and families. A curious distinction developed in Durham. As the city limits expanded, the city school district remained stationary. New schools outside the city school district did not apply to be part of the city school system; instead, they chose to become part of the county school system. Over time, three areas existed ' 'county,' 'city-out' (i.e., out of the city school system but inside the city limits), and 'city-in' (i.e., inside the city school system and inside the city limits). As the school population within the city-in area decreased, several schools were closed. And as the school population within the city-out and county areas increased, brand-new schools were built. Thus the Durham community had an expanding county school system that included the city-out schools and an imploding city school system that looked like the hole-in-the-donut on a map of the county. My husband and I lived in that 'hole' with our preschool son and infant daughter. I had been a high school teacher, a middle school administrator, and a doctoral student, so I watched the emerging educational politics as both an educator and a parent. With the pragmatic support of the business community, whose leaders realized that dual, disparate school systems had become a serious obstacle to further economic growth, city-in, city-out, and county became the unified school system of Durham Public Schools in 1992. Support for unification of the schools, however, was not universal within the community. Some people who were part of the former school systems' power bases were not happy about the change. A neighbor of mine put it more bluntly: 'There are only two groups of people in Durham opposed to school merger ' black folks and white folks.' Durham's county commissioners submitted the merger plan to the state legislature for approval rather than submitting it to the direct balloting of a local referendum. In this climate, I ran for a four-year term on the new school board from a district that included part of the old hole-in-the-donut. The new board was designed with seven seats: four from single districts 1, 2, 3, and 4; two from combined districts 1-2 and 3-4; and one at-large seat. …
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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