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September 21, 2005
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| Second graders at Earle Brown Elementary School worked as a small group on math problems. (MPR Photo/Tim Pugmire) |
Brooklyn Center, Minn. — Brooklyn Center and Osseo are addressing their racial imbalances through a collaboration with five adjacent school districts. They teamed with Anoka-Hennepin, Buffalo, Fridley, Elk River and Rockford to create a new entity called the NorthWest Suburban Integration School District. With the help of a $10 million federal grant, the group created magnet programs in 10 existing schools.
Executive Director Marcia Moore-Foster said the magnet schools feature one of four specific themes: International Baccalaureate; visual and performing arts; science, math and technology or world studies.
"That's one way where we can move families across districts." Moore-Foster said. "The ultimate goal is to help the schools that have over 50 percent students of color to deduce that to a more equal 50-50."
Moore-Foster said part of the job is convincing minority families in Brooklyn Center and Osseo to enroll their children in magnet programs located outside of their home school districts. At the same time, they need to bus an equal number of white students from the outlying suburbs into Brooklyn Center and Osseo.
"If we took 125 out, kids moved out of Brooklyn Center, we would try and do marketing and recruitment to make sure that we brought 125 in," Moore-Foster said. "So that no district would suffer financially by losing a lot of their students with no students coming in."
The collaboration puts the districts in compliance with the state desegregation rule, which was reshaped in 1999 to recognize the changing racial demographics underway in many suburban and rural school districts.
Under the revised approach, a school district is labeled as "racially isolated" when the number of students of color is 20 percent higher than its neighboring districts. Identified districts must then submit an integration plan to the state.
At Earle Brown Elementary School in Brooklyn Center, students of color make up 67 percent of the enrollment. In teacher Martha Jamison's class, second graders work on math problems in small groups. One of the new students in the class is Boone Almquist, who is white. His morning bus ride from Maple Grove to Brooklyn Center takes nearly 50 minutes. Boone doesn't like the bus ride, but he likes his new school.
"Just like meeting new people, learning new things.," Boone said. "And some of the classes are different, like I didn't really have Spanish in my other school. And we didn't really have art. We just had like crafts in our room last year. And the people are really nice."
Boone's mother, Wendy Almquist, said the decision to change schools was based entirely on her son's academic needs. The rigorous International Baccalaureate curriculum at Earle Brown provides more classroom challenges for the bright second grader. Almquist also recognized an added benefit from having her son in a more racially diverse environment. Boone's old school in Maple Grove was only 18 percent students of color.
"When he tells me about the friends that he's meeting and the friends that he's making, he's never once described them as being a certain race, you know, one race as opposed to another," Alquist said. "At this age, in this generation I don't think, unless they're learning at home, it's not on their radar, which is absolutely wonderful.
If Boone sticks with the IB magnet theme through high school, he'll attend classes in two school districts. Other magnet students will spend time in three different districts. The complicated journey is designed to spread out the impact among all seven participating school systems.
The magnet program at Earle Brown has attracted 24 new students from neighboring districts this year. It's modest start, but educators there are expecting the numbers to grow over time as word spreads about the program.
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