IS CORPUS CHRISTI SIMPLY A 4A TOWN?

THIS ARTICLE IS STILL IN PROGRESS

CAUTION: BELOW, I SPEAK GENERALLY RE: LOCAL GEOGRAPHY AND THE SCHOOL-GOING POPULATION. IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE OR UNDERSTAND THESE FACT-BASED GENERALITIES, PLEASE READ SOMETHING ELSE. ALLOW ME TO SUGGEST THE COMMENT SECTION OF A caller.com ARTICLE ON THE COLISEUM.

Updated 12/16/09: People are finally coming around. Read this article from today's caller.com here.

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Previous caller.com article with map of proposed boundary changes: Here

Tomorrow night, Tues., Dec. 1, the 2nd of 5 meetings to discuss proposed CCISD boundaries occurs at Miller High: CLICK HERE for more info.

Why should you care?

The last high school built for CCISD was in the late 1950s. In 1960, the population of the metro CC area (including Calallen, FB, etc.) was 266K¹ and the largest structure on what we now call "Southside" was the CC Country Club. Big development was between Holly and Saratoga. South of Saratoga and east of Airline didn’t exist.


Fig. 1

What did exist was a much tighter population serviced adequately by 5 high schools. To demonstrate this, I've represented the 1960 population of CC with a circle with the 5 high schools arranged in a smaller circle within (Fig. 1). Take a look at a map and you'll see this illustration is not far from accurate.

Now, 50 years later, the metro population has grown to 380K¹ (metro increase of 114K people), we haven’t built any new high schools, CCISD has no money to build one², and we are faced with the question of how best to utilize what we do have.

Here are the current enrollments at each high school acc’d to CCISD:
Carroll – 2,282; King – 2,424; Ray – 1,825; Moody – 1,812; Miller – 908

I don’t have school capacity stats at this point, but will update this article with them soon.

There’s no huge revelation here: The city is moving south and so are the city’s children. The once circle-shaped city is now an oval. All of the high schools are located left of center, and most of the children live in the center or right of center.

Fig. 2

The schools closest to the kids are Carroll and King and they are, therefore, busting at the seams. No kids live near Miller so it's vacant (now's when you need to reread my caution at the top of this page).

With no money, they say, to build a new high school the task was given to 20 or so citizens, with massive ccisd-funded input, to redraw the lines that feed high schools to evenly redistribute kids into the five existing schools. A second charge was to reinforce the 'vertical paths' of kids--keeping everyone in one elementary school going to the same jr. high and on to the same high school.

Looking at Fig. 2 above it's not difficult to figure out what happened. To get kids into the empty Miller you 'steal' from Moody and Ray. To restock the losses from Miller and Ray you 'steal' from Carroll and King. Then King and Carroll are freed up to take more in from the growing south. What you've effectively done is move all of the boundaries South. In fact to get the numbers at schools as even as possible, you have to place the Ray/King border immediately adjacent to King. Look at the map again. You can literally live two blocks from King but now you're going to Ray.

Issue: when the economy recovers, our local home builders and developers intend on pushing south. One local homebuilder has plans to build over 1500 homes near Cimarron/Yorktown/Rodd Field when these rainy days go away. These homes will be filled, generally, with upstart families with kids. Those kids (those that stay in CCISD) will go to King (where else can they go?). King is already almost full. Oops.

No new high school means that in a few years a new boundary committee will convene TO PUSH THE RAY/KING BOUNDARY EAST OF KING and the MOODY/CARROLL BOUNDARY SOUTH OF CARROLL. Hear me: When this inevitablity occurs, students south and east of King will drive past King to go to school at Ray. Ditto with Carroll to Moody.

Keep in mind that the Boundary Committee was told "Do not make suggestions based on or wrapped around a new high school--there is no money to build one."² They did the best they could given this critical limitation. But the process and the inevitable outcomes are symptomatic of the largest citywide issues:

--a) short term solutions taking precedence over long term strategy (the creation of a bayfront master plan is good enough; don't bother executing that master plan) and the current population paying for the sins of the past
--b) the quick acceptance of limitations (no new school--it's simply not an option)
--c) the failure to budget maintentance (see the condition of our parks, the coliseum, weed-grown medians and ditches, etc.)

and most egregious:

--d) the failure to address the ethnic and socio-economic realities of city shift and sprawl.

CCISD is currently conducting public discussions at all 5 high schools to answer questions and get public feedback. At the first one at Carroll, 5 people showed up.³ The short term outcry seems to be small--a few families (relatively) will go to a different school next year. The long term lack of a real solution to our problem remains to be addressed.

ps. I served on the boundary committee.

¹http://www.censusscope.org/us/s48/m1880/chart_popl.html
² "Elliff said the only instructions to committee members were that they not center their plans on the possibility of a new high school, because the funding was not available." from http://www.caller.com/news/2009/nov/09/ccisd-considers-changing-high-school-attendance/
³http://www.caller.com/news/2009/nov/19/school-boundaries-meeting-draws-small-crowd/