Seattle's contradictory school-assignment proposal
'Choice' competes with 'predictability' in a proposed new plan for assigning students to buildings. And a former School Board member and journalist thinks choice, the status quo, will probably win.
Tomorrow, June 20, the Seattle School Board will likely adopt a strategy to change the way the district assigns 46,000 students to elementary, middle, and high schools. Seattle's present system, adopted 10 years ago, allows for a great deal of choice by parents and students, but it's complicated and expensive – it involves navigating a bureaucracy, and kids are bused all over town. An overhaul in time for the 2008-09 school year is planned.
There are four things the board wants to accomplish:
- Save money by cutting back on busing.
- Maintain school choice so as not to drive away the mainly middle-class families that use the system to get their kids into the better schools.
- Increase the predictability of school assignments to increase middle-class enrollment and bring in more money.
- Simplify the system so it doesn't - as it does now - disadvantage primarily the poor and new immigrants who have difficulty with enrollment processes.
To varying degrees, these goals conflict with one another, and different board members prioritize them differently. Cutting across these goals is the district's fundamental problem: dramatic differences in school quality.
The proposed assignment plan itself doesn't directly address school quality, but the board has appended to it about $1 million per year in new spending at southeast Seattle schools. That spending on Aki Kurose Middle School, Rainier Beach and Cleveland high schools, and the African American Academy - in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods – takes some of the sting out of the tough choices contained in the rest of the plan, and it provides political cover for the School Board.
Said Brita Butler-Wall, a former board president who's decided not to seek re-election this year, after a public hearing on the plan last week: "I think the real key is the Southeast Initiative." Without it, she couldn't vote for the proposed assignment plan.
The underlying problem of varying school quality makes school choice so important to the district and, when it comes to changing the assignment plan, a migraine for the School Board. Choice came about to soften the blow of desegregation and busing 30 years ago, to minimize, if not prevent, white flight to private schools and the suburbs. Choice has morphed since into a tool for savvy families of all races to steer their kids to the better schools. In short, choice has become an entitlement, allowing kids near weak schools the chance to attend a better-regarded school in a different neighborhood.
It's not surprising, then, that the draft "framework" (144K PDF) for the new assignment plan makes almost no changes in the level of school choice the district will offer. Parents will still have a cluster of elementary schools to choose from, though it will be smaller, down to three or four schools from five to nine today. The plan promises that seats will be left open for choice at middle and high schools, though "logistics" will make this hard to deliver. There will be choice rules for admission to the alternative schools, such as TOPS and Salmon Bay, both highly regarded K-8 programs. Regarding choice, it's "details to come" over the next five months if the board approves the framework as scheduled.
The downside of preserving school choice as the framework suggests is continuing to spend money on busing. According to board member Michael DeBell, savings would range from $3 million to $5 million annually if schedule changes, such as staggered school starting times, are employed. That's on top of $1.5 million in expected savings from switching all high school students from yellow to Metro buses, a change planned independently of any new assignment plan. To put those figures in perspective, next year's cost for busing is about $29 million. Since the preponderance of political pressure will come from families seeking to preserve school choice, the board will have to make hard, unpopular decisions when the details are voted on next fall to have a chance at meeting the savings targets.
As a demonstration of the value parents place on school choice, at PTA meetings and the like where the issue comes up, middle-class families will quickly suggest and eagerly offer to pay for their children's bus rides. (It's axiomatic that low-income families would never be required to pay.) Such a system is possible but worrisome. A lot of paying customers likely would inflate the aura of entitlement around choice and busing.
There's no doubt that school choice has kept the district and the majority of middle-class parents together over the years. But among the losers, the parents who didn't get the schools they wanted for their kids, there's been no such warmth for the district. In fact, over the past four or five years, a number of these parents have succeeded in changing the terms of the debate. A desire for "predictability" in school assignments has begun to challenge choice as a way to attract more middle-class families back to the district.
The new framework recognizes the value of predictability and proposes a "base" assignment for each child to the family's neighborhood elementary school. From there, kids would follow a "feeder pattern" to one specific middle school. Grabbing a few buzzwords, the framework says feeder patterns "provide for K-8 articulation, collaboration and accountability; and ... support increased family involvement in schools," but the plan avoids the dreaded phrase "guaranteed assignment," which is used only for elementary schools. By middle school, predictability would be slipping away.
When it comes to high schools, even feeder patterns almost disappear. The framework dissembles with these words: "Students' interests often evolve in different directions as they get older, so a different balance between predictability, continuity and choice is appropriate." In other words, back to the choice method of school assignment. District planners long ago realized that at middle and high school, they can't offer guaranteed assignments. At least the framework is honest about why: "[G]iven the size and location of middle and high schools, and the distribution of student population, continuous feeder patterns from middle to high school are not logistically possible."
In that language is the message that the new assignment plan won't look much different from the current one, despite the hopes of many parents to know from the beginning, based on where they live, what elementary, middle, and high schools their children will attend.
Based on district attendance data, here are a couple examples of the logistical quandaries: If all the kids for whom Ballard is the closest high school were assigned there, enrollment would explode to nearly 2,400, way beyond building capacity. If all the kids who live closest to Rainier Beach High School had to go there, enrollment would rise from only 400 to more than 1,800.
The Ballard example shows why there's been such a battle over enrollment there, beginning with a lawsuit brought in 2000 by Parents Involved with Community Schools (PICS), a Magnolia parent group, over race-based assignment. The case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District) The Ballard example also vividly demonstrates the long-term consequence of closing and selling off Queen Anne High School in 1981. Magnolia and Queen Anne kids are the ones pounding on Ballard's door; their parents are leading the charge for predicable assignments.
The Rainier Beach example shows where community-based assignments could be a plus. Dramatic increases in enrollment at Rainier Beach would bring dollars to support the comprehensive, college-prep high school programs Beach now lacks.
In contrast, increased enrollment is the almost certain plus side of an system in which parents truly knew from the start where their kids will go at the transition to middle and then high school. There is plenty of proof for this in the stories of parents who have left the district for private school. The loss of those families is not trivial for a 46,000-student district that has seen gradual enrollment decline for the past five years. Fully 25 percent of all school-age children living in Seattle are sent to private schools. The loss climbs to 35 percent and even 50 percent in some middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods.
Every middle-class child enrolled in public school brings the district at least $6,200 - about $4,700 in state money and another approximately $1,600 in local property levy dollars. (Low-income children bring in more money from federal and state special programs, but the total is always less than the district spends on them, which it makes up from the local levy.)
Every regular student - from the middle class - generates a surplus the district uses to increase spending on behalf of low-income children.
On the board, DeBell has become the leading advocate of using increased predictability in the assignment plan to increase the district's market share among the middle class. Support for predictability "is the strongest voice we hear from comments" on the plan, DeBell says.
To follow that course, though, district planners and the School Board will have to look over the horizon, because, ironically, a district that just closed seven elementary schools needs more middle and high schools. Options include re-opening Wallingford's Lincoln High School in 2012, when its present role as a temporary home for other high schools being refurbished ends, and developing more K-8 schools to take the pressure off the so-called comprehensive large middle schools. None of this can happen fast.
The planners' "not logistically possible" euphemism presents another troublesome truth for the proposed assignment plan. To be meaningful, school choice requires empty or reserved seats. There aren't really many empty seats at middle or high schools, and the current plan relies on a shuffling of students (you like it here, I like it there) to work as well as it does. Reserving seats, either for nearby residents or for students who will improve the racial balance of a school, is what the debate, and the current case before the Supreme Court, is all about. Pending the court's decision, board members have been instructed by the district's lawyers not to talk about alternatives to race as an assignment factor. Nevertheless, there is interest in using low income as a preference in school choice, a position advocated by Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat and this writer.
The bottom line remains academics. How do you make schools better, get more kids performing up to grade level? An assignment plan, however crafted, probably won't contribute much. It can work better, particularly for low-income families, if it's simpler, and that's one of the goals. But the Seattle School Board is left seeking other strategies to improve student performance, particularly in the district's weaker schools.
Sadly, in a budget of more than $500 million, the $1 million in the assignment plan's Southeast Initiative is not much. In that light, assignment changes that would increase enrollment and district revenue should glow with a high priority. "Capturing middle class families is the key to creating money to redirect [to low-income students] under the weighted student formula," says DeBell. But the devil is in the details, and what the board might choose by November is another matter.
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 9:04 a.m. inappropriate
For most, "choice" is an illusion: Based on my experience with the kindergarten enrollment process this year, choice doesn't play much of a role in the admissions process. If you live in a neighborhood with a good school, you send your kids there. If you live in a neighborhood with a crappy school, you try to get into one of the good schools, but you end up 36th on the waiting list because the kids in the immediate neighborhood have priority over you. So, you are stuck paying for private school.
That's what happened to us. We really really really wanted to send our daughter to public school, but the good schools in our cluster (Stevens, McGilvra) are so popular within their immediate neighborhoods that we didn't have a chance. I've always been a strong supporter of public education, but this system screwed us over, not to mention the kids in our neighborhood who can't afford private school.
I consider myself to be a progressive liberal, but at this point, if another public school levy appeared on the ballot, I'm not even sure I'd vote for it.
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 11:19 a.m. inappropriate
Predictability isn't always good: Of course there are conflicting goals! Otherwise the problem would be easy to solve this issue would have been handled back when Mr. Lilly was on the Board.
Predictability itself has conflicting sides. Predictability has been promoted as a positive, but it is only a positive when the predicatable outcome is good. When the predictable outcome is bad, then predictability is a negative. The truth is that people do not want predictability; they already have predictability. What they want is a predictably good outcome.
To illustrate: A family living in Magnolia wants predictability in school assignment. I have good news for them. They can predictably enroll their child at TT Minor elementary school, Meany middle school and Cleveland High School. There! They have predictability. But they aren't happy with this predictability because they aren't happy with proximity or the academic programs at these schools. That's the difference between predictability and a predictably good outcome.
Why this Magnolia family thinks that another family should be required to accept mandatory assignment at these schools is a whole other topic.
Sean, who posted above at 9:04, is an opponent of predictability because he suffered from the predictable outcome. But I have good news for Sean. The problem his family experienced was not related to choice, but to the need to right-size the reference areas. The reference areas for Montlake, McGilvra and Stevens are too big. They essentially leave a number of families without a reference area school. The reference areas need to be made smaller. Part of the current process will be to right-size them. After the right-sizing, Sean still won't have access to McGilvra or Stevens, but perhaps he won't feel so "screwed over" if he has predictable access to his reference area school, along with the other families in his neighborhood. That school may be TT Minor.
He may not want to scoff at that offer. After right-sizing, the TT Minor reference area will stretch north into Eastlake and Capitol Hill. Let's also remember that when the new middle school reference areas are announced, complete with feeder elementary schools, Montlake, McGilvra, and Stevens will feed to Meany. TT Minor is also likely to feed to Meany. This will bring a whole new population to Meany - the administration and staff there better prepare for the adjustment. Similarly, the northward reach of the new, right-sized TT Minor reference area, and the feeder pattern of TT Minor to Meany, is likely to bring some real change at TT Minor. They may both become desirable assignments.
That's one way, I suppose, of improving a school. The trick, of course, is to make every school good enough that the benefits of having it nearby make it the best choice for the vast majority of reference area families. Yes, there may be other schools that are better in some ways, but on the whole, considering all factors, the reference school should be the school of choice.
The path to this outcome is not through changes in the assignment plan, but changes in the schools. There is another, much more important, initiative underway at the District: earlier and more aggressive district-level intervention in failing schools. For the past several years the District did not step in and work to improve schools when they failed to meet benchmarks on test scores or enrollment. Going forward they will.
In the end, that's the district's academic role - to assure school quality, to provide oversight, to provide assistance where needed, and to intervene when necessary. Perhaps when an educator is in the executive position, the district will again assume that role and we will make all of this assignment stuff moot.
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 11:27 a.m. inappropriate
Re-open Lincoln: Capacity needs to match demand. The district needs to re-open Lincoln as a smallish (800) comprehensive high school, probably co-located with Summit K-12. There is no need to wait for 2012. The District can use Wilson-Pacific or Jane Addams as the north-end interim site.
Summitt K-12 needs a more central site - Lincoln would be perfect. And Summit high school students might have access to a wider variety of courses and more rigorous academics if they could take some classes with Lincoln comprehensive high school students.
If Wilson-Pacific isn't in usable condition then the District needs to put it into usable condition - otherwise what's the point of having the building? I hate the excuse that the buildings aren't habitable.
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 11:29 a.m. inappropriate
20,000 more Seans: School assignments make as little sense as Hillary's health insurance schemes/scams. Seattle kids deserve 40-50 more private school choices as the Seattle School District is probably only capable of managing that many fewer buildings and approx 20,000 fewer students. Sean is becoming a 'red-state' kind of guy!!
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 3:03 p.m. inappropriate
The Goal: "The Goal," here, refers to a book that articulates a "theory of constraints" that affect productivity. In the book a boy scout hiking trip is used to illustrate how a system can optimize its performance. The troop heads down the trail without considering the ultimate goal of getting everyone to camp safely. The fast kids speed off leaving the slower kids behind. The fast kids will get to camp well before nightfall, but when will the slower kids arrive? The scout leader realizes that if the fast help the slow, they'll ALL arrive at their destination on time. So he has the faster scouts take some of the load from the packs of the slower, thus equalizing the throughput of the system, with the ultimate result that EVERYONE gets to camp on time.
The analogy to the school system here is that the MINIMUM QUALITY of a school system is what counts, not the achievement of the elite, who will achieve no matter what. If parents know that the WORST CASE for their kids at a given school is still good (they graduate and pass the WASL) then they'll be happy putting their kids in those schools and in that system. Predictability of outcome ACROSS the system is what counts, not just at the better schools.
"The Goal" of the Public Schools is -- Surprise! -- to educate everyone! From this perspective, the whole offering of school choice is just a can of worms allowing middle- and upper-income parents the chance to advocate for their students at the expense of lower-income students whose parents are less likely to advocate. Result: lower income kids get screwed and we spend a lot of money waving our arms around about choice and predictability and the like. Plus we waste $3M to $5M on busing to implement this non-educational value. That's 1.1% to 1.8% percent of the value of the average student expenditure down the drain!
CoolPapa has it right that the relative quality of schools needs to be equalized so that parents don't feel penalized by assignment of their kids to poor-performing schools and forced to seek out private schools that parents would prefer not to pay for. And AnimalAl has it right that if the Public Schools won't compete, then private schools will (and should) fill the gap.
Public schools MUST become more effective. That means becoming lean by shucking NON-EDUCATION expense and rationalizing the total number of dollars coming into the system so that the DOLLARS APPEAR ON THE SCREEN, as they say in the movie biz. How many school district dollars are being directly applied to educating students, and how many are paying for debt service and bureaucracy? How many are paying for teachers as babysitters, as law enforcement? How many dollars are paying for parking lots and athletic fields?
How is education itself being measured? Are teachers held ruthlessly accountable for the achievement of students or do schools graduate math illiterates and hope that the marginalized poor drop out to make the statistics better?
The school district STILL needs a wake-up call; the current rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic of many failing Seattle schools only postpones the inevitable sinking. An Educational Emergency should be declared and the City and State should intervene with emergency funding to get failing schools up to snuff. Political Neros are fiddling (Nickels and Gregoire) while the Rome of Education is burning.
The School District should offload operations as much as it can to more efficient operational providers (remember the boy scout hike analogy) -- busing is a start, security to SPD would be a good next step, and offloading of athletic fields to Parks, and bldg maintenance & general real estate to the City would generally "right size" the school district.
What's left? Education!
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 3:38 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Predictability isn't always good: Interesting post.
As I see it, the problem is that the schools system allows people to segregate themselves along racial and economic lines, and in this city, separate is definitely not equal. Once a school gets a critical mass of at-risk kids, the administration abandons middle and upper class families (as happened at Madrona), and those families understandably abandon the schools. Or, in the case of TT Minor you end up with a school whose population reflects the demographics of the neighborhood as it was 15 years ago rather than today. (By the way, of all the schools I visited, including private schools, TT Minor was by far the most racially homogenous.)
One solution is busing, which balanced out the public schools quite well where I grew up. I'm not sure why why Seattle stopped this practice.
Another alternative is to add one or two new schools to the Stevens and McGilvra references areas in order to serve the kids on the waiting list for those schools. I know for a fact those waiting lists have well over 30 kids each, more than enough to fill at least one kindergarten class. The lists would probably be even larger if more parents thought they had a chance to get in.
Your idea of reworking the reference areas sounds like a promising alternative, although expanding TT Minor's reference area might only expand the number of middle class kids that get screwed out of a good school. It's certainly easier and more practical than the above suggestions, so I'd say it's worth a try. Hope it works.
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 7:44 p.m. inappropriate
Perceived School Quality: It would be interesting to know how Sean got information that helped him classify the schools in the Central cluster as "good" or "not good" - my experience with parents (especially K parents) and their perception of school quality is that:
1) it's all about buzz, and what other parents in your circle of acquaintances say,
2) the buzz is often based on not a whole lot of substantive information,
3) a school's reputation (the buzz) often lags the reality, for better or worse (i.e., a school retains it's "good" reputation often long after parents have begun to quietly wonder whether they made the right choice - and it's only after a wave of departures that the buzz starts to change)
4) the change in the other direction (the buzz on a school on the rise) is often just as glacial
5) folks' pointing to "WASL" scores is often code for not being comfortable with a racial or socio-economic community - and their understanding of WASL scores doesn't take in to account the "disaggregated" data or other measures of what kind of learning is going on in the building.
Not saying Sean went about his school search in those ways - but if he did, I think he'd be in the majority of parents in the district...
Posted Wed, Jun 20, 2:02 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Perceived School Quality: Fair question.
If you live in a neighborhood where you actually have a choice between several decent schools, I'm sure you end up factoring in superficial information or "buzz" (you've got to decide somehow, afterall). As for our situation, the disparity between the good (Stevens, McGilvra, Montlake) and the bad (TT Minor, Madrona, Leschi, Bailey Gatzert) is patently obvious to anyone who cares to look.
Why are these schools bad? Well, here is my assessment against the criteria that matter to me. This is based entirely on the schools' websites and school tours:
1) Academically strong peer group (WASL scores at these schools are very low)
2) Diverse peer group that includes at least some kids with backgrounds comparable to ours (these schools are quite homogeneous, almost nobody in my demographic goes to any of them)
3) Active and engaged parent community (these schools mostly have small and inconsequential PTAs)
4) Teachers and administrators who are skilled with achievement-oriented students (I only visited TT Minor in person, and with the exception of the Montessori teacher who is fabulous and whose program shows great promise, most of this school's energy and expertise goes to the 3rd of the students whose basic needs (food, clothing, hygiene) are not met at home. It's good work they are doing, but not a good fit for our daughter).
5) Teachers I can relate to (at TT Minor, there were some very friendly teachers, but surprisingly, a few that were actually cold and even kind of hostile. I can't say what the principal is like because unlike every other school, he/she did not show up at the tour)
For those of you scanning my comments for "coded racism", I'll just say that there were plenty of middle-class and upper-middle class black families at the Stevens, McGilvra, and Montlake school tours (not to mention the private school tours) who were in the exact same position we were. With integration positive assignments on hold, I'm guessing they were screwed over as well.
Posted Wed, Jun 20, 4:53 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Perceived School Quality: The reasoning you've gone through to select a school should be of highly valuable to the School District. It highlights 1) the disparity in actual educational output in schools as measured by WASL scores, 2) demographic apartheid (i.e, what seems to me to be white school/black school divisions, but maybe I'm just reading cultural racism between the lines here), 3) communities where the parents are less involved with the schools than others 4) achievement-oriented academic teaching vs remedial intervention - social worker - babysitter - cop teaching, and 5) hostility towards parents.
I dare any parent to consciously select a school for their kids where the WASL scores are relatively low, the racial demographic makes your kids a tiny minority, the parents in the community don't care about the schools, teachers spend less time teaching and more time having to play social worker, and the teachers don't like you. Any takers?
So what is actually actionable here for the School District? First, they've got to intervene big time in getting WASL scores up in the poorer performing schools. An absolute priority. Do what it takes.
Second, they should provide incentives for desegregating the schools. If the Supreme Court says it cannot be done based on race, then socio-income class is probably a decent proxy. But they've got to mix it up so that mixed races are normal in all the schools. This is a benefit for everyone, and actually something that some parents will MOVE for (when shopping school districts for example).
Third, they've got to provide more incentives for parents to get involved in the poorly performing schools. That means real out-reach and even real money. A program where the PTAs from the better schools reach out to help the weaker PTAs would be good too.
Fourth, for problems such as guns in schools, gangs, drugs, poverty, homelessness, etc., the district need to be super-aggressive in getting other stakeholders involved to help solve those problems, because these problems will put a monkey wrench in the the educational engine of any school. So this is a huge partnering challenge for the school district, but one in which other social agencies should be highly motivated to help, and one where the district office can really help out the individual schools.
Fifth, if teachers express contempt for parents touring a school to decide whether to send their kids there, then imagine what it'll be like when these teachers aren't on their best behavior in front of parents. This is an "attitude" problem. A place with a lot of bad attitudes is a place of negativity and is disastrous for learning. Leadership and attention to the problems that produce or allow the bad attitudes to fester may be in order. But like the attitudes of members of a team, losing draws out the bad attitudes and winning makes 'em disappear. So working in a poorly performing school is likely to breed the bad attitudes of teachers, since the state of the school you're working in is a systemic problem for which you individually get blamed. Fixing bad attitudes is often not directly actionable. Better to fix underlying problems.
The above would be my action priorities to get parents with the program. Note that these priorities emphasize equalizing the schools across the board in terms of a) culltural heterogenity, b) rough equivalence of WASL scores, and c) achievement of a common positive educational environment through partnering to address any social deficits that may pre-exist in certain school environments.
Will this be part of the School District action plan? Doesn't seem likely. Right now I'd place my bets on continued movement of families to the Eastside and the better performing districts there, and continued flight of students who stay in District boundaries to private schools. Que sera sera.
Posted Wed, Jun 20, 7:51 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Perceived School Quality: I can only say that my family chose a school in the north end that had 150 students 7 years ago and now has waitlists, and it got there one parent and one neighbor at a time, with $10,000 and a one-year deferral of closure from Joseph Olschefske in 2000 and nothing else from the district (except another closure recommendation in 2005).
It was a serendipitous confluence of like-minded neighbors and parents - none of whom had any guarantee of the future but were committed to the possibilities. Now it bears the stigma of "affluence" and charges of favoritism - as undeserved as the wholesale classification of "failure" and "no good" in 2000.
A lot depends on the principal - that's a fact - ours was assigned by Olschefske and accelerated the momentum. But PTAs don't just materialize - they build slowly - and to Stuka who conflates schools with struggling PTAs and parents who don't care - yikes.
And it has to matter to you that it works - a lot. I just wish people didn't find it so easy to blame only the district - which BTW as part of Washington state is 46th in the nation in funding and doesn't have the budget for marketing and parent engagement to turn some of the buzz around.
All of which is an argument for assigned neighborhood schools - if all of your neighbors are going to TT Minor, you're going to make sure it works and you're going to make d* sure your legislators and your governor know that schools starved for funding are responsible for the disintegration and polarization of our society - and are not ok.
Posted Wed, Jun 20, 10:54 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Perceived School Quality - An Argument for Assigned Neighborhood Schools: Good points:
- Your point that PTAs don't just materialize, they build slowly is well taken. That's another reason I'd like to see established PTAs providing guidance to PTAs at other schools.
- I don't think I confuse struggling PTAs with struggling schools, but there's clearly a correlation, so I do conflate them.
- It may appear that everyone is heaping scorn and discredit on the School District, but they are the lightning rod and they've got to distribute the shock to Ground, and the Ground should be the City and the State, and the districts own operations. If done properly, it should be pretty easy to get the school district turned around. I think it means focusing on raising the quality of the lesser schools. (And I actually think developing "elite" schools leads to the divisiveness you see now and maybe why the Gates school initiative didn't go anywhere.)
Ultimately, ultimate_fan, I agree with you. I cannot say it better and you said it best:
"All of which is an argument for assigned neighborhood schools - if all of your neighbors are going to TT Minor, you're going to make sure it works and you're going to make d* sure your legislators and your governor know that schools starved for funding are responsible for the disintegration and polarization of our society - and are not ok."