I’m not getting to as many protests and community meetings as in year’s past, but when a concerned Forest Hill parent reached out to me about Wednesday’s meeting re: potentially moving Camden High students to Forest Hill, I decided to stop by and catch up on where the Camden High saga has taken us. I’m going to (once again) defer from analysis on that wider issue (it deserves its own post), and focus on the arguments made by students, parents and community members to the school district. 

I’ll start by saying this. At times, the meeting at Forest Hill had a profoundly different feeling than many that I’ve witnessed. If you squinted, this was almost a functional situation. The SDA approved money to renovate a traditional, public high school (good thing). The school district listened to community and students that did not want to see Camden High split up across multiple sites (good thing). As a result, the top option is to move to a local elementary school — whose parents have understandably balked at being told they’re the ones who have to bare the inconvenience of relocation (not a good thing, but a normal thing that you can imagine happening in other districts). And I’m willing to take the district at its word that it’s trying to make the best of the situation — and that they are looking for a better option. 

Of course, this is Camden, so it’s not quite that simple. I was talking to someone from the school district, and he told me (and I’m paraphrasing here): it’s hard to be a progressive champion for government in a place where government has screwed up so badly.

 

 

The meeting itself was moving. Child after child, many of them in second, third or fourth grade, asked not to be moved. By far, the most common theme was bullying. These children were scared that they would not be safe at the relocation site with older kids. [I’ve included the student demands at the end this post]

As I listened to parents speak, and talked to educators, activists and parents before and after the meeting, I started to fill in around the edges. Just a year ago, the Forest Hill parents had won a major victory, getting their kids separated from middle schoolers after a series of bullying incidents. Now, just 6 months into the new arrangement, they were told their students would go back to school with middle school students (likely some of the same ones that made the younger students feel unsafe in the first place). 

When parents started speaking, a second theme emerged: lack of trust. Parents have been shuffled around too many times to believe that a school — once relocated — would return in its same state. Many referenced Lanning Square, which was closed due to facility problems. The promised school was never rebuilt, and was instead replaced by KIPP-Cooper Norcross Academy — a school that the community did not ask for, and the school board initially voted against. One grandparent told a heartbreaking story about having had a child in Lanning Square when it closed, then struggling (even walking) to get her child to Parkside Elementary School. Eventually, she moved to Parkside to make that trip easier, only to have Parkside Elementary close. Now, with a young child in Forest Hill, she was facing another transition. (I assume given the timeline of Lanning Square’s closing, this story must have been stretched across multiple children).

The history of moving students around was referenced by other speakers, who talked about how difficult these transitions were for students and families at Whittier or Parkside.

There was a palpable lack of trust in the room. That’s an indictment of the current administration of the school district — parents felt betrayed that they would be moved just a year after working to make it an elementary-only school — but also a historical indictment, the failures of Lanning Square happened after changes in government (and Sheila Green, who helped organize the meeting, was explicit in describing that we all expect changes after the next gubernatorial election). 

There’s more to say — about how these trust issues intersect with a state takeover, about the dangers of such relocations setting communities against each other (Forrest Hill parents asked that Camden High renovations be delayed unless a more suitable relocation plan was found), and the impact of instability on a community (perhaps as a criticism of this model of opening/closing schools and wider school choice) — but I want to leave analysis to other posts and instead focus on the specific demands of developed by the students of Forest Hill: 

1. We the students of Forest Hill School want to stay at our school because we do not want to be disliked. Research shows that we lose 6 months of our academic development when we are displaced. The building is big enough for elementary students. And we need stability not experiment.

2. We the students of Forest Hill School need our special education student’s needs met right now. We want our special education students to be comfortable in our building with our classrooms & with our teachers who know and love them.

3. We the students of Forest Hill School fear that the younger students & special Education students will not be safe at Big Picture Learning Academy.

4. We the students of Forest Hill School are clear that Forest Hill would not be a good fit to maximize the educational experience for the high school student. Forest Hill is not a good fit for high school students to grow in.