SIVACRACY.NET

This week our fifth grader is graduating from our local Title I public elementary school, and so – for the first time in ten years – we won’t have a child in a school that benefits from the 1965 federal program aimed at high poverty, low achievement classrooms. It happens that his culmination ceremony also coincides with the 100th anniversary of this traditionally very ethnically and socio-economically diverse school. Historical photographs and documents were on display in the auditorium, and the kids buried a time capsule that expressed both the times they live in and their McKinley pride.

Although we live in an affluent, media-centric beach city with a median income higher than Beverly Hills, in which residents jog by in their Ivy League togs, a series of not-always-happy accidents of geography, urban planning, and global immigration continue to perpetuate the school’s Title I status. As my youngest kid signs yearbooks and paints a school mural with his peers, I look back on being one of those horrible parents who went to the district offices with a map and a ruler begging for reassignment. I’m glad I was talked into staying, because both my kids received excellent educations at a Title I school. Plus, I met a lot of cool moms and dads in a neighborhood where some mothers wear tattoos and others wear the hijab.

Often, in the No Child Left Behind era of standardized testing and scripted learning, parents with a D.I.Y. sensibility about education are turning to homeschooling or – if they stay in the system – to alternative or charter schools. Yet somehow the parents and principals of this particular school managed to make their own design choices, despite the inherent bureaucracies of life under Title I.

During the decade we were parents at McKinley Elementary, the school garden produced delicious fruits and vegetables for the salad bar and snack time. A music program provided each child with an instrument of choice and the opportunity to play in a school band, and professional musicians in the McBand played at all the school events. The artist who also served as the beloved school librarian created a morning book club that made getting kids up early worthwhile. And, of course, every Halloween – as it had since at least the twenties – the school threw a mind-bogglingly elaborate Halloween carnival that celebrated all kinds of subversion in which the teachers’ outfits were some of the most anti-authoritarian.

Now things are in flux in our zip code, as the film 90404 Changing documents, but I hope the school continues to realize many of the ideals about participation and the public sphere that it has represented for the past century. Of course, if they change the name of the school from the American imperialist expansionist whose presidency is thereby honored, I certainly won't shed any tears.

Cross-Posted at Design Your Life. (Their manifesto is here.)