It's not explicitely stated, but this article is NOT about inner city African-American students. Guess who they mean here:

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=65393

BOULDER - For years, the lines of society have often shown in schools. Rich neighborhoods have what some consider rich schools and vice versa. However, Boulder Valley District officials want to change seeking a balance at all schools.


“We want our students to experience diversity that’s in our world,” said Dr. Chris King, Boulder Valley deputy superintendent.

King says schools in Boulder, and around the country, have become stratified. District leaders believe the separation between rich students and poor students have impacted the achievement gap in academic performance between white students and minority students.

“It’s a different way to slice the issue and we’re looking a solution a lot of people haven’t tried before,” said King.

The effort is called de-stratification and no other district in the country is trying something like it. The achievement gap is a nationwide problem, especially in urban schools. Administrators have tried a number of different approaches, but rarely do minorities catch up to whites in tallies on the standardized tests.

The Boulder Valley School District thinks it can attack the achievement gap through lunch.

“There’s a high correlation between our Free and Reduced lunch population and our minority population in Boulder,” said King.

The government’s Free and Reduced Lunch Program is often used as a measurement of the poor population in a school. District officials want to have every school in the district enroll a 20 percent Free and Reduced lunch population because that is the district wide average.

“Our goal was to have all our schools reflect the broader community,” said King. “Not to have some schools at one or two percent Free and Reduced and other schools at 60 or 80 percent Free and Reduced.”

King says the district is creating incentive programs to either draw poorer students to richer schools or richer students to poorer ones. For example, Centaurus High School in Lafayette has traditionally had a high minority and high Free and Reduced Lunch population. Under de-stratification, Centaurus developed a pre-engineering program and International Baccalaureate, which usually attract affluent families.

Centaurus was the pilot for Boulder Valley’s district wide strategy.

“When I arrived at Centaurus, there were very, very clear lines of stratification among students,” said Ron Haddad, a biology teacher at Centaurus for the last 12 years.

Haddad says the high number of Free and Reduced Lunch students often equated to a high number of struggling students which overwhelmed the staff.

“They were tracked into very low-level classes. They stayed there and they graduated and we all applauded. We figured we’d done a good job. We got them through high school,” said Haddad. “That’s just not good enough.”

Now, Centaurus has a balance closer to the 20 percent district average of Free and Reduced Lunch students and the principal said academics are improving.

“Five years ago, we were a low achieving high school and now we’re a high achieving high school,” said Dr. Deidre Pilch, the principal of Centaurus.

Pilch says teachers have it their mission to bring up the traditionally low achieving student who usually happens to be a minority.

“The teachers here and the support staff here have worked diligently with a laser beam focus to figure out how to meet the needs of each student,” she said.

“We have teachers here who want and choose to teach students who are struggling,” said Haddad.

Though, he admits teachers cannot solve the life problems that often trouble the student from a poor family.

“But, I can create an environment in here which is interesting where students respect each other which is safe and that can at least be a distraction and at least a model for that student of what a healthy community is like,” he said.

Parent Dawn Dishman says she likes the atmosphere at Centaurus for her two sons because of the minority population.

“That’s the very thing that probably keeps us here, we really want them to be around a diverse group of people,” she said. “Actually, that is a learning experience in itself that is even above and beyond the curriculum.”

However, there are those who think de-stratification too closely resembles desegregation, an idea which did not work to improve academics.

“You couldn’t move these kids based on race, because that’s illegal and so you can move them based on socio-economics, but it still doesn’t address the cultural issues, education issues,” said Bill de la Cruz.

He is a former Boulder Valley Schools board member who was in office when talks of de-stratification developed.

Moving students around is not the answer de la Cruz said. He believes if the district wants to erase the achievement gap then it should put more money into programs that had the high minority, or Free and Reduced Lunch, population in the first place.

“When we’re left with these high needs schools, why don’t they have the resources that they need to educate those children,” he said.

“There’s definitely a tipping point,” King said.

He says the evidence shows that schools with a high minority, high Free and Reduced Lunch population cannot reach all students effectively.

“It’s easier to offer programs to meet the needs of all kids in the school that has a 20-80 split,” he said.

“There are schools in poor areas of our country that don’t have the luxury of saying let’s move these kids to higher achieving schools and they find ways to educate those kids,” de la Cruz said.

King says this is just the beginning of a complex solution to a complex problem. In the end, he says Boulder may have discovered a solution other districts nationwide can follow.

“I think we’ve learned some lessons that other schools can benefit from,” said King.