Madrona School – Neighbors Not Understanding Each Other

 Two weeks ago, I attended a meeting at my local elementary school, to learn more about what is going on over there.  Max is turning three this month, so we’re starting to spend more and more time figuring out the school situation here in Seattle.

 Attending this meeting was particularly interesting to me, since i had heard there was some growing tension between some parents and the administration, that seemed to be boiling down to race issues.  Madrona has historically been a black working-class neighborhood, and is probably most famously known as the home of the Black Panthers headquarters for Seattle during the 60’s.  The school mascot of the Madrona school continues to be the Panthers, and there is a famous statue in the neighborhood of a panther and a pig kissing, to commemorate a truce that was forged between the Black Panthers and the Seattle Police Department during the heightened racial tension that existed in the 60’s and 70’s.

Here’s an interesting link on the Seattle Weekly site that retells some stories from those days:  http://www.seattleweekly.com/2006-08-02/news/aaron-dixon-s-radical-past.php.

What I knew going into the meeting was that the school was adjusting to a change in the make-up of the community.  I’ve been living in Madrona for 10 years now, and have seen it grow more and more middle-class.  The eastside of the neighborhood has always been predominantly white and upper-middle-class; most of these homes have a view of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains to the east.  The westside of the neighborhood, which used to be predominantly black and working-class and middle-class, is shifting to be less black (and more white), and becoming more and more middle-class. 

So, I was assuming this change might have some sort of affect on the school, but I was largely in the dark on what the problems might be.  I knew of quite a few white families that sent their kids to the school, but this was a fairly recent phenomenon, and the school is still about 75% black.  The neighborhood, however, is only about 1/3 black now-a-days.  The Seattle Times published some charts that shows some of the changes that have happened over the past 30 years, which you can see to the right.

My mother was in town for an extended visit at around the same time;  this is great, since she spent 25 years of her life as an elementary and middle school teacher in the Philadelphia area.  While the school she taught at was mostly a white neighborhood, it was fairly diverse economically.  So, she has personally dealt with a lot of the issues that show up in public schools when you have some parents that micro-manage the faculty and think that their child needs to be in the gifted program because of course they are a genius, while on the other side, a ton of kids are showing up without a lunch and their parents have more important concerns then helping with homework (such as working multiple jobs to make ends meet).  So, mom came with us, as did some other neighbors, and we headed to the meeting.

 Boy, what a meeting!

The Seattle Times had a reporter there, and covered the entire three hour discussion.  From the first second of the meeting, it was clear that the room was a powder keg, and the facilitator was walking on egg shells the whole time.  Here’s a great write-up of the event on the Seattle Times site, that I think did a superb job in giving a balanced view of the issues at hand.

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=madrona28m&date=20070328&query=madrona

For myself, my family, and my close friends that attended, we all considered ourselves outsiders to the discussion; basically, eavesdropping into other people’s conflicts.  We live in the neighborhood, and we have small children, but they aren’t of school age yet.  But, although we considered ourselves outsiders, we are all white.  And therefore, it became clear that we were lumped into one side of this debate, even though we took pains to not throw our two cents into a discussion that we as of yet did not truly understand. 

My race and my middle class upbringing gives me a particular point of view on things and biases my ability to make purely objective observations.  But, to the best of my ability, here is how I would boil down both sides of the conflict.  If I am totally wrong here, it’s due to me only really absorbing this conflict out of one three-hour meeting.

• The people who don’t want change: this group is predominantly black, but has a healthy group of white parents who are happy with the way things are at the school.  This group of people think the new white people want to turn their school into a high-end oasis of scholarly learning and slowly get the black people out of the school. The undercurrent here is that the new white neighbors are racists.  There is a lot of comparison with the school conflict and the gentrification that is going on in the neighborhood. They see what is going on in Madrona as white (and asian) people “stealing” black homes (because taxes are going up) and slowly turning Madrona into a comfortable white middle class area. They fear that giving into demands of white people means black people giving up something. They already are losing the neighborhood (in their view), so they sure as hell aren’t losing this school.  It also turns out that the black people at Madrona school have an emotional connection to it’s blackness; they see it as a place to send their kids if they want their kids to grow up and have lots of relationships with other black kids. I guess a lot of the Madrona school kids don’t actually live in Madrona (although most do), and the people who commute from other neighborhoods usually have a parental or grandparental relationship to the neighborhood (i.e., they grew up there in the 60’s).
• The people who want change: this group is predominantly, if not completely, non-black (white and asian).  These people are incredibly indignant that the black people in the discussion think they are racists. They believe that they are the good guys, and are exactly the sort of white folks that black folks should be allies with. The white folks want to send their kids to a neighborhood school, and don’t care if 50% or 75% of the kids are black. They just want it to be a neighborhood school. But, the school is doing very badly in national tests, and has had to do things like cancel recess, scrap Spanish class (remember that the school is K-8, so no foreign language until you get to high school!) and other reductions in services. They do this because all the money is being focused on “at-risk” kids. When a lot of the parents organized together to raise money via a PTA to bring back things like a Spanish class, it became clear that the principal and the staff at the school didn’t want the white parent’s “charity”, and they took pride in the the focus of the school to be for at-risk kids. The white folks thinks this is admirable, but doesn’t serve the needs of every student, and that madrona shouldn’t be a magnet for every at-risk kid in the entire school district.

This tension resulted in 7 white kids getting pulled out of the school in September of this school year by their parents. A lot of these parents spoke at the meeting.  After they transferred their kids to other schools (such as Montlake), these parents were then “fired” as volunteers, and were given side comments from staff that “if this school isn’t good enough for your kids, we don’t want your help”. The parents think this is crazy; they figured the school just wasn’t the right school for their kid, but then it’s still the neighborhood school in Madrona, they have talents (such as math tutoring), and still want to give back to the community. But, they were rejected.

This is just an awful situation to see.  As a neighbor, I want to see people talking to each other in a constructive way.  I want to see everyone participating in creating a great community.  As a parent, I want there to be a school within walking distance that will serve his needs, regardless of it’s racial composition.  I don’t understand why we can’t have all of these. 

The University of Washington was pulled in to facilitate the meeting, and did a good job keeping things positive, while at the same time, letting every person who wanted to speak (or vent) be able to do so.  Not everyone in the room was constructive, but democracy is both ugly and beautiful.  You have to take all of it if you want all of it. 

I’m looking for a way to participate in this conversation in the future, but it’s not clear to me that us non-parents in the community are, frankly, wanted by the school district and the faculty of the school to be part of the discussion. 

Here’s for hoping that smart, respectful, open people on both sides find a middle ground, so neighbors can start understanding each other.  And, in the process, we create a great neighborhood and a great school that we all feel a part of.  That definitely is not the case now.