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The new school choice
04/02/2012 5:32 PM by John M
Chimborazo Elementary School and Church Hill are front and center in a Christianity Today look at people moved by faith to take a stake in challenged urban neighborhoods across the country.
Over the past decade, a group of mostly white, middle-class Christian couples have moved into Church Hill, the community served by Chimborazo Elementary School. […] These four couples have the financial and social capital to send their kids to private schools or to homeschool. Yet they have chosen otherwise. Building on the firm foundation Principal Burke has laid, they want to help restore a community struggling against generational poverty, and they believe a key component is sending their own children to the community’s public school.
Great stuff.
@ PTG, I agree “great stuff”, but it would take a lot of changing for my children to attend most of the public schools in Richmond. . I volunteered at Chimborazo for seven years, and it could get quite scary at times. However, it would be grand to see Chimborazo reach William Fox or Mary Munford’s test scores + exceed them.
This is a small step in the right direction, and perhaps we can all encourage more upper middle class people with children to move here and ‘STAY’. There is one thing the city of Richmond could do (do away with federally mandated busing) and I feel certain it would save money. I am confident many of you realize, we are busing black children to all black schools + the cost of fuel continues rising. Would any of you object to the city having neighborhood schools, and children be able to walk to school in groups all across the city? I remember seeing in early fall last year where a bus was in an accident on Belt Blvd. and most of the children on the bus were from Albert Hill Middle. Why were these children not attending a middle school in their own district because of that archaic law? The city could appeal to the state government and then to the federal government for permission to do away with busing.
I have lived in church hill almost fourteen years, and ‘NEVER’ south of Broad. However, I do admit there are times I feel like throwing in the towel and moving to Hampton Gardens etc. In addition, I realize in doing this would be giving into the few who do not want any gentrification up here.
Has anyone heard anything about Chimborazo trying to be the first global (international) school through eighth in the region?
@RG – You’ve got it backwards: RPS *is* based on neighborhood schools. Look at this map of where the schools draw from around them. This means, for example, that MLK Middle School in the East End draws all of it’s students from the neighborhoods and housing projects around the school.
Students can go “out of zone”, to a non-neighborhood school, for any number of reasons. Students traveling from Belt Blvd to Albert Hill would’ve been have been going to a middle school ranked much better than the one for which they are zoned by address, not through forced bussing. Sometimes this done voluntarily because the parents see a value in this, sometimes students are sent to different schools because of behavior issues.
RG – Forced bussing ended in the 1970’s. The kids attending out of zone school are almost always doing so because the parents believe their zoned school is far below standard or too dangerous to attend. Richmond parents have to really scramble to send their children to schools out of zone.