There’s story in the Hartford
Courant regarding the challenges Manchester may because the ethnic balance in Manchester schools is becoming too unbalanced
under guidelines laid out by state law.
The article mentions that these concerns may be rendered moot because of the interaction between forecasted changes in demographics
and the terms of the state law, but I did find some of the solutions being considered, should mootness not occur, to be interesting:
The racial-balance remedy that is getting the most attention is redistricting. Under a preliminary scenario, about
1,000 of Manchester’s 3,000 elementary school students would be sent to a different school starting in 2008. As a result, schools
would all have a minority percentage between 30 percent and 56 percent.The district also is considering a “sister schools” plan that would have students from paired schools attend kindergarten through
second grade in one building and grades 3 to 5 in the other.A third option is “controlled choice,” which would call for a fixed number of slots to be reserved at each school for white and
minority students. Under that plan, parents would rank their preferred elementary schools and a lottery would determine a student’s
eventual placement.
It’s a shame that we still haven’t reached a point where ethnicity is irrelevant to the quality of education that one receives, and
that all this shenanigans has to be undertaken to move towards the perception of fairness.