Will Redistricting Permanently Divide Franklin?

Redistricting is never easy and is hardly new in Franklin. Conversing
with the ‘Ladybug kids’ who attended Franklin schools in the
1970s and 1980s, one finds that they each have a tale of being involuntarily shunted from one school to the next, sometimes annually, throughout
their school years.

Fortunately, changes
have been mostly more measured in recent years. But the current plan
to divide the school system into two large elementary school areas on a
north-south basis has set off alarm bells for some, particularly with
regard to the socioeconomic divide it implies.

Stated simply, the
southern district will have almost all the town’s multifamily and
apartment dwellers, as well as students living in municipally owned
housing, while the north will have almost none. 

This observation
comes straight from the public school’s “Franklin Public Schools
School Boundary Line, Map Analysis, and Reorganization Information”
posted with other redistricting information on the school web site.

The chart, below,
from that document, is about as stark as the data that once put
Boston into court-ordered busing.

The data also
strongly implies a situation in which the South, which certainly
includes some economically advantaged neighborhoods, will be suffused
with tensions between haves and have-nots while the North will be
just a happy, economically homogeneous suburb.

To be sure, one of
the arguments for closing Parmenter Elementary – carefully worded
so as to offend no one – was that more students in that school were
`challenged’ in one way or another, whether it was academically,
emotionally, or socially. Eliminating the school and redistricting
would eliminate that statistical embarrassment, it was implied. But
now, something similar is being carefully constructed and promoted as
progress. One part of town will be, almost literally, the wrong side of the tracks, to lean on an old euphemism.

Perhaps there is
more to the story that is not obvious or perhaps the interpretation
taken here is mistaken. We hope so. If not, we hope the Franklin
Public Schools will think again before so boldly reshaping our
community.

IMAGE:North and South is the title of three American television miniseries broadcast on the ABC network in 1985, 1986, and 1994. The image is of a DVD collection.