Caddo schools need to close Booker T. Washington

Soon, the Caddo Parish School Board will make a decision about the fate of its Booker T. Washington High School. The correct call will involve some courage and creativity.

BTW, like a number of schools in inner-city Louisiana metropolises, has seen an exodus of students. At the end of the school year in 2005, over the past five years the district’s student population fell nearly 3,000 students, or almost 6.5 percent. At BTW, enrollment at the end of 2004-05 was 443, a drop of 246 in five years or about 55.5 percent.

There are two reasons for this. While population in the area served by the school is falling, it’s obviously not fast enough to record this drop. The main reason is that BTW, despite the inability of some to accept it, is a failing school along with its feeder schools. It has been classified as “academically unacceptable” two of the last three years, missed its performance growth target also two of the last three years, and achieved only “minimal” academic growth the past year.

Concerned families are voting with their feet. They are finding ways to get their children out of that environment, through majority-to-minority transfers, magnet programs, or simply by moving to another high school’s attendance zone. BTW’s inability to provide an adequate education for the majority of its students (over half of 2004-05 graduating seniors did not even score at the basic level on the Graduate Exit Exam), even as it has seen some improvement (in 2000-01 almost three-quarters did not reach the basic level) has caused its hollowing.

This has prompted the School Board to propose shifting attendance zones, but the plan drawn up is almost ridiculous in its geography. Students just a stone’s thrown from Fair Park or C.E. Byrd High Schools would end up going to BTW, and some families made location decisions on residences just to attend either of those other high schools. Busing expenses for the parish would escalate as well under the proposal.

There’s nothing the Board can do on its own to trigger the economic development necessary to bring back population to BTW’s current attendance zone, much less for the entire district (parish), and its attempts to increase quality of education at BTW have not had much payoff. Thus, the best policy would be to close BTW and farm out its students to Fair Park and Byrd (which, given the peak of their historical enrollments, could handle the extra students, mostly at Fair Park), as well as sending BTW’s best teachers there while discharging or transferring to other openings the remainder.

This will raise the hackles of some, perhaps including Board members who themselves are graduates of BTW, and teachers whose sub-par performances will have to improve for them to stay in the profession protected by their unions to whom quality education is an afterthought. But we can’t let sentimentality or politics get in the way of a decision that will improve education for students and save millions of dollars a year for the district. Even as district-wide enrollments have swooned over the past 13 years over 14 percent, hardly any facilities have been closed by the district, even as its budget has swelled over 55 percent or $130 million over the past 10 years.

But to assuage these feelings, the Board should resolve to name the next high school it builds (one has been talked about for years being built in southwest Shreveport) “Booker T. Washington.” Washington was a great educator and any place of learning should be proud to bear his name.

Allowing the situation to continue as is won’t make it, and changing zones creates other problems and will not provide better education at a cheaper price. The Caddo Parish School Board must act rationally, not emotionally, and close BTW.