Trouble In Eden (Prairie, That Is)

Everybody, whether they have children in school or not, seems to have an opinion on the quality of education they're getting.  It's where they're getting it that's another story.

Here in Eden Prairie, where a national magazine recently declared it the best city in America, the local school district announced a proposal to redraw the boundaries so that some children who currently go to one of the five elementary schools near where they live will be bused to another school somewhere else.  That would start with the 2011-12 school year.

The district claims they did this to ease the overcrowding of some schools, so they're going to even things up by moving at least 1000 kids to less-populated schools.  Oh, and the demographics needed to be changed to accommodate the various schools' free-to-reduced lunch program.

Some parents, who question the need to send their "little darlings" on a 25-30 minute commute across town when they could be walking to school in their own neighborhood, have responded  by threatening to pull their kids out of the district and moving elsewhere.

For those of us with long memories, doesn't this sound like what happened in the 1970s, when courts ordered big-city school districts to bus students to the suburbs to achieve racial balance?

As a former student who attended Eden Prairie schools in the 1960s and '70s, I could count the number of minority students with one hand  Maybe two.  Eden Prairie has grown a lot more diverse since then, but it's still overwhelmingly white.  Maybe that's why some parents don't want their children to be bused somewhere else.  Maybe they don't want them to know about "those other people".

The Eden Prairie School Board, led by Superintendent Melissa Krull, hasn't helped their cause by cutting parents (or anyone else) out of the loop on this issue.  They've been accused in the past, mainly by disgruntled parents and one of the local suburban newspapers, of alleged violations of Minnesota's open meeting laws and allegedly hiding behind the Data Practices Act every time someone wants information.  Now they may have resorted to this for legal reasons, which is fine.  But when you're accountable to the public, deciding the future of your children's education with something like this smells like a backroom deal gone bad.

No, not everything is perfect here in The Best City In America.  People want what's best for their kids, whether they're willing to pay through the nose for it or not.  They just don't like being told that they can't send their kids to a school that's close by, and are willing to take to the streets to prove their point.  But what are the kids learning?  That the actions of adults will have a big influence in their upbringing, and that they are powerless to stop it?