On Feb. 1, Superintendent of Middletown Public Schools Michael Frechette submitted a document entitled Revision to Plan to Address Racial Imbalance to the Connecticut Board of Education. Among issues at other Middletown schools, the document addresses the disproportionately high percentage of minority students at award-winning Macdonough Elementary School. Wesleyan has had a partnership with Macdonaugh for over a decade.
For several years, the proportion of minority students at Macdonough Elementary School has been slowly increasing. According to Oct.1, 2008 enrollment data, the proportion of minorities at Macdonough is 28.67 percent greater than the average for Middletown area elementary schools, making the school racially imbalanced according to state law.
According to the racial imbalance sections of the General Statutes of Connecticut, which were put into place in 1980 and amended in 1999, a school is racially imbalanced if the percentage of minority population falls outside the range from 25 percentage less to 25 percentage points more than the district average. Schools that are found to be racially imbalanced must submit a correction plan to the school board.
According to Izzi Greenberg, Director of the North End Action Team (NEAT), a city-sponsored task force created to address poor conditions in the North End of Middletown, the district has threatened to shut down the school several times.
“The simplest way for the district to deal with the issue is to close the school and disperse minority students,” she said. “The district has threatened to close it, but the families and community have rallied to keep it open.”
Macdonough Principal Jon Romeo was unavailable.
The most controversial components of the plan involve redrawing the school’s attendance boundaries and making it a “public school of choice,” meaning that students outside of the established attendance zone or neighborhood could apply to attend Macdonough, but may have to provide their own transportation to the school.
A feasibility study conducted with an outside consultant, JCJ Architecture, concluded that “shiftshifting attendance boundaries may cause the student demographic balance to change. However, given the wide distribution of subsidized housing throughout the District, it is equally possible that adjusting attendance boundaries may have no impact on the demographic . . . Unless carefully implemented, adjustments to attendance boundaries could make certain schools in the District more unbalanced relative to the overall racial proportions in the District.”
“Redistribution would move some pockets of students of color to other schools,” Greenberg said. “So some students wouldn’t be attending Macdonough next year—there would be a lot of shifting within all the neighborhoods. There could be as many as 60 seats open for application in the fall.”
Currently the University runs nearly half a dozen programs with Macdonough, according to Director of Community Service and Volunteerism Cathy Lechowicz. From after-school tutoring programs like ASCEND, which provides support for first generation college-bound students, to service-learning classes, to the fraternity Psi Upsilon’s recess activities, Wesleyan students have created a bond with the Macdonough School, she said.
“Last semester we had 40 to 45 students in the WesRead and WesMath program and 12 in the service-learning courses, so there were probably close to 60 students involved, which doesn’t even count the other volunteers and informal activities,” Lechowicz said.
Although there was originally discussion of turning Macdonough into a charter or magnet school partnered with Wesleyan, the plans were not executed.
“There were just two different sets of ideas,” said Vice President for Diversity and Strategic Partnerships Sonia Mañjon, “But we are committed to our partnership with Macdonough and are looking at how to best move forward and deepen our commitment.”
According to Mañjon, 25 percent of Wesleyan graduates go into the field of education. The Think Impact Team, a group of five Wesleyan students, is studying the challenges and successes of the Wesleyan-Macdonough partnership. The results of the study will be released March 28.
Meanwhile, the Middletown School District will meet on March 9 to determine whether to employ the recommendations of a school board committee that reviewed the JCJ Architecture suggestions.
“Macdonough was a failing school, one of the worst in the state,” Greenberg said. “But Wesleyan has a renewed interest and commitment, and a lot of programs and groups came in and our kids our finally doing well. We have a happy, warm community that the neighborhood stands behind. I think they want to change it as little as possible and enhance the partnership with Wesleyan.”