DMPS School Board Meeting 02/19/2008 - Part 1
February 21, 2008 by admin
Filed under Community, Education, Guest Writer: Field, M.R., Politics
The Des Moines Public Schools School Board meeting of February 19, 2008, had moments of greater public interest than usual but it also appeared to many people to be business as usual. Of most immediate consequence was approval for an out-of-district diversity plan. The board gave approval for submitting a plan to the state on a vote of 5-2, with the two minority board members, Teree Caldwell-Johnson and Jonathan Narcisse, voting nay. A special board meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 26th, to hear proposals from Superintendent Nancy Sebring about what criteria to include in the plan. The board will vote on the specific plan to submit at that meeting.
The district held four forums last week relevant to the discussion of a diversity plan. In short, the June 28, 2007, U.S. Supreme Court decision in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, et al. prohibits using race as the sole or the dominant component in school assignment. As a result, the Iowa Department of Education set new rules that require school districts with desegregation plans to file a diversity plan by March 1, 2008, or to give up forever the right for such a plan. The district also posted a survey to its web site and distributed a copy to forum attendees to gather more direct input on public opinion.
Phil Roeder, director of community relations for the DMPS, reviewed information gathered from the forums and from the online survey. Approximately 160 people, in total, attended the four forums. The forums were advertised in 9 ads in the Des Moines Register, with information on the DMPS web site, through communications sent out via principals and the citywide PTA, and in conversations with representatives of the African American and Hispanic communities. (I looked in the community section of the newspaper that is mailed once a week but did not see an ad.) The survey ws completed by 1,030 people, the vast majority doing so online. The results of the survey, online February 11-17, must be taken with some caution as those people participating in it self-selected to respond. Caucasians represented 84% of respondents. Economically, 3% of respondents had household incomes below $25,000 but 23% had incomes over $100,000. Respondents (61%) favored having a diversity plan that includes both socio-economic status and race. There were a few extremities in responses. Priorities for choosing an in-district school based on the experience of teachers and staff was favored by Latinos (85%). African Americans (72%) supported an in-district diversity plan that would reflect the diversity of Des Moines.
Much of the public and board discussion surrounding the diversity plan centered on the desire for students to be exposed to different people to help prepare them for a global workplace and society. There were a few personal experiences shared. One woman raised the ire of Board President Dick Murphy when she spoke about the way her children’s friends were treated by white teachers, without providing specifics. Murphy lashed out saying teachers at the school mentioned had been helpful to his children, who are of mixed ancestry. The board was interested in how school assignments would be made and Sebring said it would probably be through a lottery. Another school district in the state was able to file a plan using academic achievement. This was discussed by the board but there were concerns over how to measure such achievement, with very strong objections to even the idea of basing it on tests.
The rest of the February 19th school board meeting will be covered in Part 2 of this report.
M.R. Field covers the school board meetings for AroundDesMoines.com. 
Clarification and additional information: A representative for the DMPS Latino Advisory Committee testified at the board meeting that the committee advocates for having a diversity plan. The person speaking had to leave the meeting early so spoke out of sequence and thus the comment was not in the part of my notes to which I referred for this post. In addition, the person decrying teachers to whom Murphy reacted spoke on the diversity plan but made the specific comments that motivated Murphy to rebuttal during comments on the monitoring report covered in Part 2 of the meeting report. I apologize for any confusion.
Correction: The 5-2 vote was for using socio-economic status (i.e., student receives free or reduced price lunch) as the sole definition of minority. The vote to adopt a diversity plan was 6-1 with Jon Narcisse voting nay. I apologize for the error.