Some parents are angry about proposed changes of Howard County's elementary and middle school boundary lines.
They say new lines being considered by the school board would accentuate divisions between haves and have-nots. And they are using strong language to express their dissatisfaction.
"Schools right next to each other have widely different FARM [free and reduced-price meal] populations," said Theodore Wimberly, whose family lives in the Talbott Springs school district in Columbia. "That tells me they're economically segregating students."
Wimberly and his wife, Adona, have a 10-month-old son - nowhere near school age - but they have been following the redistricting process and said they have become increasingly alarmed over what they have seen.
The heart of their complaint: The redistricting plans presented to the Board of Education by the School Boundary Line Committee would increase Talbott Springs' high free and reduced-price meal percentages (at 41 percent in February) and decrease its achievement test scores, they say. But nearby Thunder Hill - which last year had high test scores and 2.3 percent of its pupils receiving free and reduced-price meals - would remain as is.
"There are these islands of protected schools," Theodore Wimberly said. "I think it's a factor affecting equity. Poor performance increases with a higher percentage of FARM students."
The Wimberlys and Cheryl Wilhelm, who lives nearby, recently sent out fliers recruiting other parents to help get the plans changed. They circulated a petition signed by 70 neighbors and drew up a plan to better balance pupil populations.
Members of the school board and boundary line committee say they did not create the problem - at Talbott Springs or a handful of other schools in similar situations - even though parents expect them to fix it.
The free and reduced-price meal student concentration "was done by the developers," said Tom Grobicki, the boundary line committee's assistant chairman. "If you go over to River Hill and look for Section 8 [rent-subsidized] housing, you can't find any. It really is a function of how Howard County is laid out."
Civil rights issues
Still, free and reduced-price meal data have been identified as something to be considered by the boundary line committee. But those involved say it must be used cautiously to avoid civil rights complaints.
Shuffling enrollment to balance the proportions of free and reduced-price meal pupils, who are frequently minorities or immigrants, could lead to accusations that pupils are being moved for those reasons.
So the committee and the board say they use the numbers to make sure no one school had a large change in its proportion of free and reduced-price meal pupils if it can be helped.
"Where there were large discrepancies, it raised an alarm," said David C. Drown, whose Office of Geographic Information Systems helps guide the redistricting process.
"We redistrict kids to match enrollment to buildings, but we can look at these other things," Drown said. "Just looking at kids racially or economically, you're asking for trouble."
But board members worry about the dangers of too much poverty in any school.
"We're trying to make things equitable," said board member Sandra H. French. "Where's the fairness for a teacher at a school who may have one student support plan [improvement plans created for poorly performing students] to write up when at another school, a teacher has 10 to 20?"
Equity report
But a Howard County report on equity - prepared by educators, parents and community leaders in 2000 at the request of County Executive James N. Robey - cautions against using "socioeconomic status as a criterion for drawing school boundary lines."
Lowering the concentration of free and reduced-price meal pupils will not necessarily improve test scores, as many parents and educators claim, the report says, and it could "mask real problems with teaching, learning and expectations in our schools."
Grobicki says that is a real concern, one he saw play out at his children's school, Phelps Luck Elementary in east Columbia.
"Phelps Luck had a terrible time when it wouldn't acknowledge it had all these kids that had needs," he said. "We were just getting average resources and had kids who suffered because they were in the midst of the regular population."
The eventual categorization of Phelps Luck as a school with needs, based on free and reduced-price meal data and test scores, helped the pupils, Grobicki said, because it brought in money for resources.
Taking free and reduced-price meal pupils and spreading them uniformly across the county, would make schools ineligible for those extras because the need would be hidden in the averages, and children would lose out, he said.
"It's not that the FARM kids are all of a sudden some huge problem," Grobicki said. "It's just that they need a lot more resources, and the focus of a school could change because of them."
Still, many parents worry that when the proportion of free and reduced-price meal pupils is high and test scores are low the whole community will suffer.
"People are not going to want to move here because of test scores," Theodore Wimberly said. "If we don't fix [Talbott Springs], it's going to kill the whole area."
Judith Dudek, who lives in the same area as the Wimberlys, does not have children at Talbott Springs. But the school's test score performance concerns her because, she said at a redistricting hearing Thursday, "they affect property values."
Improved scores
Talbott Springs has recently made strides in its oft-criticized test score performance, with its second-graders scoring among the highest in the county on one measured test.
The 32 second-graders participating in the free and reduced-price meal program at Talbott Springs scored extremely well on the test. The fourth-graders did not fare as well, though, with half of the pupils scoring in the bottom half of percentages. Fourth-graders participating in the free and reduced-price meal program did worse: 67 percent were in the bottom half of scores.
Last year, 11 children transferred from Talbott Springs under a provision of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that allows parents to move their children to higher-performing schools if their home school meets certain conditions - among them, high poverty levels and consistently poor test scores.
"I don't think it's fair. We have a very good school and excellent teachers," said Cheryl Wilhelm, who has two children at Talbott Springs. "The people who don't want to go to our school are people that have never been to our school."
While Wilhelm and other Talbott Springs parents say they are proud of their school, they are not interested in seeing it face the challenge of a higher proportion of pupils taking part in the free and reduced-price meal program.
They met with Drown last week and offered an alternative plan aimed at balancing the demographics of Talbott Springs and nearby schools. Drown sympathized with their goal but said their proposal had flaws. He came up with an alternative.
His plan suggests moving 83 pupils living in two apartment complexes out of Talbott Springs and into Stevens Forest Elementary, which had a 15 percent free and reduced-price meal population in February. To compensate for the loss in pupils, children from single-family homes off Tamar Drive would move into Talbott Springs.
Some board members have suggested that the problem might be solved by combining the populations of Talbott Springs and Stevens Forest, sending lower grades to one and higher grades to another.
A similar scheme is being considered for Waterloo Elementary and the not-yet-opened Bellows Spring Elementary, along with Bryant Woods and Running Brook elementaries.
"These are schools that sometimes - this is especially true for Talbott Springs and Stevens Forest - have a difference in the population they draw from," said board member Virginia Charles. "This would allow a bigger pool of people so there wouldn't be as large a difference."
Positive response
Wilhelm, the Wimberlys and other Talbott Springs parents say they are heartened by the positive response of Drown and the board to their complaints.
But they recognize no promises have been made. And they wonder why plans that raised their school's free and reduced-price meal program percentages were allowed to go to the board.
"The whole redistricting thing doesn't seem like it's [a] comprehensive approach," Adona Wimberly said. "It seems more of a neighborhood approach. If your neighborhood isn't at the table when it needs to be, you might miss out."