This will achieve three things:

1) It will move Edison’s racial profile closer towards Alameda’s overall school profile

2) It will reduce Edison’s enrollment to a manageable number

3) The “lucky” Edison students going to other schools will have the advantage of experiencing more diversity first-hand than their peers remaining at Edison. **

This is effectively what happens in San Francisco’s public schools and, of course, at the University of California. Except it’s the Asian students who are displaced by others. All in the name of diversity, of course.

Since you are mostly enlightened progressives, this plan should pose no problems for you.

* Along with Franklin (~50%), Edison is one of two elementary schools out of ten in Alameda with a majority white student enrollment.

** By far, Edison has the highest white student enrollment of any other Alameda elementary school (~70%)

“I believe another variable would be if the parents of Child 1 chose to keep Child 1 at School X, it was my understanding that the school district would allow the sibling priority to apply for the diverted child’s sibling”

I don’t think there is any need to state beliefs, let’s just stick with the text that the District have proposed. You cannot assert sibling priority unless you are resident in the school’s attendance zone. So Child 1 remaining at School X would not be able to assert priority for their younger silbing also wishing to attend School X, unless they moved to be resident within School X’s attendance zone.

Of course, the District (i.e. Mr. Dierking) may wave their hands around and assert that they’d cover this special case. But why are the Board Of Education not holding them to a better standard than this hand-waved crap they keep coming up with?

It’s not that hard to write a document that covers this stuff unambiguously. If I were a Board member, the minimum I would have demanded is that the District go away and come back with a written document that unambiguously describes what their policy actually is. And if the policy doesn’t allow the notional diverted Child 1 in School X to assert sibling priority, hold their feet to the fire and justify why the hell it does not.

I believe another variable would be if the parents of Child 1 chose to keep Child 1 at School X, it was my understanding that the school district would allow the sibling priority to apply for the diverted child’s sibling. Of course, I am basing this on my often faulty memory, but I recall a similar question being asked during the Ruby Bridges meeting. After all, that would be the equitable way of handling an unwanted diversion to another school.

Of course the largest variable of them all is this hypothetical only comes into play if there are more kids enrolled than there are spaces AND if the district can’t add any more capacity to the school to accomodate additional students.

I think you’re trying to accuse me of hypocrisy, however I had thought that discussion would happen during the long-term/boundary adjustment discussion, not the current discussion and so saw no need for discussing possible boundary shifts.

Thus my comment Hopefully, tomorrow night, the board will move forward with this part of the plan while waiting to dig in deeper into the facility and district boundary discussions that are coming up soon.

Another border change idea would be the strip from Central up to Santa Clara. Why didn’t you suggest that?

This is very confusing, so please allow an example of a family at our preschool. Their eldest son will apply for Kindergarten next year. There’s a good chance he will be diverted as he is the oldest sibling in his family (which is a very real possibility given the proposed enrollment policy and the overcapacity facing a number of schools). He could be diverted to school X. When middle brother applies for Kindergarten, he can not be guaranteed a spot at school X, because they are technically an “out-of-zone” family. The sibling priority does not apply. The second son could be diverted to school Y. Their third son, for all the same reasons, could end up at an entirely different school from the other two. Where is the sibling priority to protect this real family who stand a very good chance of having 3 children in 3 different elementary schools?
This is the problem with the proposed sibling priority.
No one wants to see siblings separated … but we need a policy that protects all siblings, and not just the siblings of currently enrolled students.