Des Moines Schools New Map Deserves an ‘Incomplete’

Des Moines Public Schools is considering redrawing attendance maps for middle and high schools. This should be good news. It is not. The schools in Des Moines face unequal problems with disparate access to resources. Unfortunately, the District’s proposed boundary plan is window dressing designed to hide its most vexing issues.

The District’s new plan creates feeder patterns for its high schools – all students at one middle school should proceed together to the same high school. Currently, some middle schools feed more than one high school. It is said the new plan will make it easier for educators to better hand-off students from one level to the next, especially those with special needs. According to District communication, the new feeder system will create more consistent learning environments and better coordination of student records, thus improving student performance. In fact, it does little to none of this.

The plan impacts so few families and students one has to wonder why the District is bothering to go through the map drawing process at all. In a district of some 32,000 students, school officials admit the new map will only impact approximately 600 students, or less than 2% of the total student population. This is hardly a huge change in the landscape. Worse, the plan does next to nothing to address the inconsistency of learning opportunities at what are the haves and the have nots of Des Moines’ middle schools.

Educators across the country track poverty based on the number of students who qualify for the free and reduced lunch program. Simply put, a school with a high free and reduced lunch population faces more challenges when it comes to teaching and learning. Free and reduced lunch numbers are an accurate indicator of a school population’s need for educational assistance and funding. Des Moines officials acknowledge this fact, so it is baffling why they did not try to draw a map that would more equitably distribute students at middle schools throughout the District.

At 34%, Merrill Middle School has the lowest number of middle school students on free and reduced lunch. All other seven non-magnet middle schools, those impacted by the DMPS map, today have free and reduced lunch numbers above 54%, with Harding Middle School ringing in at a staggering 87.9%. While the new map might potentially lower Harding’s number over 10% to a projected 77.3%, the changes at the other schools range from a 4% decrease to a 4.7% increase. Shockingly, Merrill’s number declines to 33.3%; while a short 2 miles away Callanan Middle School will see its numbers rise from 72.8% to 77.5%. The trend at these two schools has been heading the wrong way for some time. In 2008, Callanan’s number was 57.1% and Merrill’s was 37.8%.

The Des Moines School District redrew its school boundary map based on the concept high school feeder systems create consistency in learning. But, DMPS avoided making eye contact with the elephant in the room. Most of the kids we are failing, those who drop-out or will fall short of their potential, are highly mobile. Their economic situation forces them to move frequently during their school years. A feeder system won’t help most of them. Des Moines’ problem is not that it lacks a high school feeder system. Too many kids are being lost to an outmoded and lopsided middle school formula.

In order to meet the needs of today’s students, school districts must rethink the way they educate. Middle schools are the weakest link in the educational chain. They will remain so in Des Moines until this school board and its administrators address the issues head-on and begin to offer bold leadership. This means scrapping the do-nothing boundary changes Des Moines is proposing and working with the community to make what will undoubtedly be difficult decisions.

It is time to fix a school system where a couple of middle schools have most of the advantages and the others have the lion’s share of the problems. Tweaking the map isn’t enough.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com 
This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register online essay.