A dispute over new school boundaries in Prince George’s County has exposed fresh anger with the county’s old practice of zoning students more by race and class than by proximity to the school.
At issue are dramatic changes in school boundaries due to the September 2008 opening of Laurel-Beltsville Elementary, which will absorb the surfeit of new students who have recently moved to the hundreds of new subdivisions in the suburban expanses 25 miles northwest of the District.
Left behind will be less-affluent students in more urban sections. Those children will attend older schools with a more highly concentrated low-income population.
Concerned parents say the new boundaries would push the school into a government category reserved for high-poverty schools. Oaklands is not considered an at-risk school.
The school’s parent teacher association will take its complaints to a public hearing on the proposal set for March 4 in Laurel and March 5 in Beltsville.
Oaklands, which this year has a racially and economically diverse student body, would lose most of its wealthier students and replace them with about 80 students from Kimberly Gardens, a subsidized housing complex a mile away, according to district documents.
For years, students at Kimberly Gardens have attended Scotchtown Hills Elementary in a more affluent area more than three miles away.
“There’s a history here of creating boundaries in maladaptive ways,” said Derek Mitchell, director of new schools for the county. “Some were because of desegregation, others because there may have been a practice of maintaining some sort of socioeconomic balance in the schools.”
In redrawing the boundaries, the school system is championing “neighborhood schools,” Mitchell said, to remedy what may have amounted to social engineering.
“It’ll be better to be closer to home,” said Keith Holland, 39, whose girlfriend’s two children live in Kimberly Gardens. He added Scotchtown Hills hasn’t always treated her kids equally. “Maybe it’s because they’re from subsidized housing,” he said.
In the county’s more divided past, schools boundaries were drawn to keep rich from poor and black from white, said school board member Rosalind Johnson.
“It was horrible — beyond politics,” she said. Today, though, she sees a new county.
“Ten years ago I would’ve been majorly skeptical,” Johnson said. “But these were drawn with integrity.”
