The Pinellas County School District has corrupted the mission of fundamental schools. Created as a tool to promote integration and establish focused, disciplined learning environments in poor black neighborhoods, they have become exclusive schools that cater to white families. That happened not by chance but by policies adopted by the school district that discriminate against the very black students they were intended to help. This is wrong, and at the very least the district should provide buses to all fundamentals.
It is imperative to understand history to realize just how shabbily the Pinellas School Board has treated so many of its black students, from warehousing them in failing schools to shutting them out of successful ones.
For decades, black students bore the brunt of court-ordered busing for desegregation. So when the School Board closed the high-achieving Southside Fundamental Middle School in the heart of a black neighborhood in St. Petersburg — moving the program miles away to nearly all-white Madeira Beach — a fair-minded, forward-looking board would have provided busing to allow students from Midtown access to a program that once was within walking distance. But the board did not. Involved parents shouldn't have to own a car to demonstrate how much they care about their children's education. Buses should be provided to all fundamental students just as they are to students at speciality magnet schools.
And yet, that's just one of the many travesties the Tampa Bay Times series "Failure Factories" has exhaustively detailed in a school system that has shorted its African-American students again and again. It set up five elementary schools for failure by refusing to anticipate the challenges of letting those schools resegregate and become overwhelmingly low-income, facing serious problems, staff turnover and burnout. Across the district, African-American children are suspended at rates seen in virtually no other large school system in Florida. But the situation with back-to-basics fundamental schools, and Southside in particular, is arguably worst of all.
The Pinellas School Board closed the highly regarded Southside Fundamental in 2009, citing costs of keeping up the building, and moved the program to Madeira Beach. As Times staff writers Cara Fitzpatrick and Michael LaForgia reported, more than 26 percent of the students were black before the move. By this fall — including an expansion of the program to add kindergarten through fifth grade — only 30 of the school's 1,394 students were black. That's 2 percent. The bottom line: The School Board took a successful program that was wildly popular with African-American parents and students and literally moved it out of their reach.
This is the height of outrageous irony because fundamental schools — and magnet schools that offered special programs in the arts or sciences — were originally intended as a way of voluntarily desegregating Pinellas public schools.
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Explore all your optionsIn fact, in the 1980s in St. Petersburg, there were two fundamental elementaries (Lakeview and Childs Park) and one fundamental middle (Southside), and all were in predominantly black neighborhoods. They worked. Parents of all races and incomes clamored for their students to attend, and waiting lists grew.
Board members may forget, but their predecessors closed Childs Park Fundamental 20 years ago — citing costs of cleaning up mold and other problems — and moved it to Pasadena Elementary in a predominantly white area, a harbinger of what was to come years later for Southside.
School officials retorted then and will do so now that it is simply a matter of cost. But what is the cost of not giving those African-American students the chance at success they had at Southside? This was an opportunity that school officials snatched away. Officials will say that busing is not provided for fundamental students, that parents have to show their involvement, in part, by getting their children to school. A car is not a commitment. A parent's dedication is.
In the last decade as the district has added more than 3,000 fundamental seats, the number of black students has actually dropped by 12 percent, because the new seats are mostly outside of Midtown. The African-American share of total fundamental enrollment is half what it was a decade ago.
School officials will say they never meant for any of this to happen, that it is a series of unintended consequences of the decisions of well-meaning people. Worse, some don't even see the point. "I'm not a huge believer that having a black, Hispanic and white student sitting together improves education," said Carol Cook, a board member since 2000. She is wrong, and such tone-deaf attitudes show why the board keeps making these mistakes.
Throughout their early decades, Pinellas, St. Petersburg and their schools suffered from institutional racism. A century ago, a black man was lynched in downtown St. Petersburg. The city redlined its neighborhoods, dictating where African-Americans could and couldn't live. As recently as the 1950s, city directories listed African-American families with a "c" for colored. And, of course, the schools were segregated until federal courts intervened. It's only been 20 years since racial disturbances rocked Midtown and buildings burned.
Some will dismiss all of this as so much ancient history. But while those rules enforcing racism are long gone, their effects linger to this day in housing patterns — as well as in patterns of opportunity. That is why leaders of the school system and the city must consider this history in every decision.
No single vote might be intended to hurt black students. But that is the effect again and again. And failure to understand this history, to acknowledge it and to own it, means that school leaders will let history keep repeating itself. They should stop this cycle, first by providing busing to all fundamental schools, particularly so Midtown students can reach Madeira Beach Fundamental. That is an easy first step. The rest will be harder, but there is no moral alternative.