Tonight (Tuesday,10-15-19) I spoke at the BG Board of Education Monthly Meeting. I chose to wear a “Ridge Elementary” School Sweatshirt. Why? It was a privilege to teach at Ridge for 13 years. But just as that school no longer exists, the educational landscape under which it proudly served this community also no longer exists. Demands on our schools have changed, as have our community and the students we serve.
The notion of neighborhood schools is a nostalgic illusion in our community and has been for some time. On Ridge’s final day the Sentinel-Tribune photographed dismissal. Photos were NOT of students walking home. In my class of 23 students, I could count the walkers on one hand. The final photographs at Ridge were of students waving goodbye from school buses – buses that traveled throughout BG. I’ve now been at Crim seven years. I still count on one hand the number of walkers in my class. Most ride buses or daycare vans that also travel throughout BG.
This reliance on transportation is indicative of cultural change. BG has now has a more transient population, with students moving in and out during the year, within & outside BG. I look back at the 5th grade classes of both of my daughters and note how few students remain in one building K-5 anymore.
Transiency even within a district, leads to interrupted progress and lost opportunities as we do not have equity of services, resources, space or staffing. Families can be faced with a choice of splitting up their children between buildings to access services. I read claims that we should just realign enrollments across schools every year, and question how that could possibly be accomplished without splitting families with children in multiple grades of varying class sizes, and without damaging those children by moving them from one school to another, year after year after year, to equalize class sizes. Those certainly wouldn’t be neighborhood schools. We don’t have them now.
Providing equitable educational opportunities and resources through equalized class sizes, spaces, teaching and learning conditions becomes possible with One Community, One School. Address should not determine access to opportunity.
As an alumni I note our community has been divided far too long. My very first letter to an editor was written as a student in the1980s, lamenting that BG was changing the kitchens at South Main and Ridge Schools to “satellite” facilities. I wrote then of the divisions between east side/west side, city and rural. It’s long past time to end that. We now have another opportunity to bring everyone together, in one school, where I believe in my colleagues and our ability to implement a successful “school within a school” concept (already proven successful with our middle school teams) that builds bridges instead of boundaries.
Times have changed. I loved Ridge School. Its time has passed. We serve a new generation of students today that deserve opportunities that are not limited by their address. It’s time for One Community, One School.
Stacey Higgins
Bowling Green
