Historic DPS student reassignment plan to begin July 1

DPS elementary schools are in the first phase.Photo byCDConUnsplash

By Alex Bass

Alex.bass@triangletribune.com

DURHAM – For the first time in its 30-plus year history, Durham Public Schools will implement a comprehensive student reassignment plan to respond to the city and county’s ongoing evolution.

“Growing Together,” the first such effort since Durham City Schools and Durham County Schools merged to form DPS following the 1992 high school graduation season, will begin its elementary school phase on July 1 for the 2024-25 academic year. Middle and high school phases start in the 2025-26 school year.

“We want each and every one of our public schools to reflect the socioeconomic diversity, the racial and ethnic identity diversity, the ability diversity, the language diversity, many measures of our community and its richness,” DPS Magnet Programs Specialist Rita Rathbone said.

Approximately 10% of DPS’s nearly 16,000 elementary school students in kindergarten through third grade will be impacted. Rising fourth and fifth graders and their siblings at the same school will be able to remain in place. Multimodal communication with impacted families, Rathbone said, began last fall and continued throughout the school year.

“Growing Together” includes a traditional, neighborhood attendance zone for each school, even those which, too, will be geographic regional school options with application-based programs. DPS Career and Technical Education and Magnet Programs Director, Julie Pack, said every elementary school will offer visual and performing arts instruction in dedicated spaces; Spanish language and culture coursework; and a daily initiative called “Everyday STEM by design.”

“This is based on an intentional problem-solving process that our scientists and our engineers use out in the workforce,” Pack said of interdisciplinary Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics content. “We’re taking that and creating a Durham Public Schools version of it, and embedding it and overlaying it in the curriculum and content areas.”

Other academic programs available per traditional and year-round calendars include dual-language immersion, International Baccalaureate, Montessori and online education. Written in the plan is a commitment to reevaluate and respond accordingly to school and wider community evolutions every five years.

DPS Executive Director of School Planning Matthew Palmer explained the state and federal relevant “Identified Student Percentage.” This number quantifies a school’s and school system’s enrollment of students whose families might be eligible for food stamps, Medicaid/Medicare or even homeless among other circumstances.

DPS’s ISP is at 47%, which makes all students eligible for free breakfast and lunch without qualifying paperwork. If an individual school has an ISP 10% more affluent than the school system’s, then DPS has legal options for fostering socioeconomic diversity.

“We have the opportunity now to use a weighted lottery at those application schools,” Palmer said. “We’ve also been using that measure in careful consideration of the drawing of our school boundaries.”

Palmer acknowledged previous school-specific application practices created circumstances by which magnet programs yielded sharply contrasting school socioeconomic demographic disparities. This history was placed in broader context by DPS Student Assignment Director Melody Marshall, a Durham student during the merger.

At that time in the early 1990s, Durham City Schools’ student population was approximately 97% Black. Durham County Schools’ student population was nearly 70% white. There, too, was the central office’s physical building.

“Half of it was Durham City Schools. The other half was Durham County Schools,” Marshall said, “in the same building where I’m sitting.”

An optimistic Marshall, aware of the challenging task for her office, noted DPS’s first high school graduating class (1993) was approximately 52% white and 46% Black.

“We’re looking at diversity, again,” Marshall said, “but through the lens of socioeconomic diversity.”