Making sense of Wake's magnet mire

In Eastern Wake County, where I live, every single school is out of whack with the county’s goal of having no more than 40 percent of the students qualifying for free and reduced lunch. That being the case, I’ve often marveled that the school system lets any student from a comfortable Eastern Wake neighborhood have a seat at a magnet school. School board member Lori Millberg said (in “Wake may tweak magnet criteria,” Page 1B, Nov. 3) what has seemed obvious to me for a long time: “It doesn’t help to reduce concentrations of poverty in magnet schools if it increases the concentration in other schools.”

The magnet program in Wake County, North Carolina, has about 2,837 nuanced, overlapping layers. But here’s the issue from that story that drives me up the wall: Millberg also pointed out that 60 students who would normally attend Knightdale High School are magnet students at Enloe High, the implication being that that’s the sort of thing the school board wants to stop with its tweaking.

Well, here’s an idea: Knightdale High School, with its 34 percent free and reduced-price lunch situation, is less than 9 miles from Enloe High School, with its 20 percent free and reduced-price lunch population. Why don’t they take some poor nodes assigned to Knightdale and assign them to Enloe if we’re going to worry about the F&R numbers at Knightdale?

This is the part of the magnet morass that I cannot understand.

Back in 1997, I chose to apply to send my kindergartner to Powell GT Magnet in Raleigh. I discovered Powell through an acquaintance at church, visited it, liked it, applied, got in. As I understood the point of a magnet school (about which I knew nothing having come to North Carolina via West Virginia), the system spends extra money putting special programs into schools that would be majority poor so that people who are not poor will want to go there.

I got it. I agreed with it. I wanted my children to go there, to be in a diverse school, to know and like and befriend all sorts of children. No one wins when a county such as ours has schools where a majority of the children are poor.

So I understood there to be a tradeoff: Getting to go to a school with such fabulous electives meant going to a school with a higher percentage of needy kids than my base school had at the time.

Where’s the tradeoff for magnet students at Enloe? They get to go to a school where outstanding programs abound AND where 4 out 5 students aren’t poor. Why does Ligon Middle School have a 24 percent free and reduced-price lunch population while Carnage Middle is at 42? They are both magnet schools and literally streets apart. Why does Powell GT Elementary have a 57 percent F&R population while Hunter AG Magnet Elementary has 26?

With so many schools in the county above the 40 percent line, no magnet school, for heaven’s sake, should be in the 20s!

I once tried to explain my thinking on this to a colleague who said he didn’t think suburban parents would still apply to Ligon, for example, if it had a F&R population of 50 percent. (I don’t agree, by the way. I think people would still apply for the programs and electives offered.) But I offered him this story:

At Powell, there was a boy who was in my daughter’s class nearly every year, a large, angry boy whom most children avoided. I’ll call him Robert. If ever I saw Robert smile or laugh or joke, I cannot remember it, and I saw him a lot because I was there a lot.

At Powell, there also was a wonderful orchestra teacher with the marvelous name of Mr. Moon, and Mr. Moon had Robert in his orchestra class when Robert was in the fifth grade.

At Powell, there also was a phenomenal choral teacher by the name of Ms. Wilkinson, a miracle worker if ever there were one in a public school in Wake County. And Ms. Wilkinson coordinated a talent show every year, a show that left me hoarse with tears every year because I was always just utterly amazed at how creative the children were and touched by, when they were able to choose whomever they wanted to work with, how often they chose to showcase their talents with friends of another ethnicity.

The year Robert was in the fifth grade, he participated in the talent show. This surly young man stood upon the Powell Elementary stage, alone with his cello, and played, I believe, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” I remember thinking, as tears rolled off my chin, that this is what a magnet school can do with these special programs, the orchestras, the dance recitals, the dramas. How else would Robert have been given this gift of music, this moving performance he likely will remember forever?

The county should be offering these opportunities to as many poor children as it can, not overfilling magnet schools with affluent kids. When we spend all of the extra money it takes to run a magnet school and then fill it 80 percent with children who could afford cello lessons or dance lessons on their own, there’s something perverted about that.

I would suggest that, in addition to its goal of having no more than 40 percent of a school’s student body qualify for F&R lunch, the system should make it a goal not to have a magnet school UNDER 30 percent. What do you think?

(Complete tangent: If you want to see something truly inspirational about what giving the gift of music to disadvantaged kids can do,  check out this ‘60 Minutes” segment from April: El Sistema: Changing Lives Through Music )