Dublin Resident Argues Persuasively for the Obvious—If Jerome Overcrowding Is THE Issue, Why Isn’t the Solution Moving Kids from Jerome to Scioto?

The commute from Jerome neighborhoods to the Emerald Campus is similar to the commute from those neighborhoods to Scioto. If those kids can go to the former, then they can go to the latter.

*****There are a few spots left for the April 22 event from 6:00pm to 8:00pm at the Dublin Panera to discuss the DCS redistricting debacle and potential tax hikes, so RSVP now to mattalanmayer@gmail.com*****

As you can imagine, I get sent a lot of material from Dubliners deeply concerned about how Dublin City Schools (DCS) is engaging in redistricting. From shock at DCS Board Member Tara Seward’s explicit push for race-based redistricting circa 1970’s racial busing to frustration that DCS is obsessed with hurting Bailey Elementary School (BES) families by pushing them from Coffman High School to Scioto High school, feelings run high virtually everywhere. Recently, someone sent me a five-page memorandum written by someone who, I think, lives in a neighborhood south of Historic Dublin and West of the Scioto River. I thought it was mostly an excellent articulation of several issues, only taking issue with a couple of points. You can read the memorandum and my notes on it beyond the paywall.

The memorandum contained a table listing various suburban schools with each school’s percentage of kids on free and reduced meals (FARM) (i.e., kids in or close to poverty). I added the non-Asian minority percentages in red. The table shows three groups of schools: schools in wealthy areas or enclaves with a low level of FARM kids (Jerome High School, Bexley High School, Upper Arlington High School, Grandview Heights High School, Olentangy Berlin High School, Olentangy High School, and Olentangy Liberty High School ); schools in well-off areas with a moderate level of FARM kids (Coffman, Thomas Worthington High School, New Albany High School, and Olentangy Orange High School); and schools in or near middle-to-low income areas with high levels of FARM kids (Scioto, all three Hilliard High Schools, Worthington Kilbourne, all three Westerville high schools, and both Pickerington high schools). The chart doesn’t include Gahanna Lincoln High School or Reynoldsburg High School, but both would fall in the last group. The author points out that DCS has the largest FARM gap between high schools then asks:

Why can’t Dublin balance their FARM student populations among their high schools, like every other comparable suburban district in Central Ohio? Is it just a coincidence that the vast majority of the lowest income students in Dublin attend Scioto HS?

On the latter question, as my notes on the memorandum below show, I answer the question stating, “It is the prevalence of old apartment complexes and neighborhoods east of the Scioto River that attract lower income residents.” Looking at the boundary maps of the various higher FARM school districts, other than Westerville City Schools (WCS), the other school districts simply seem to draw boundaries in a common sense fashion; namely, a line bisects the district with kids going to the school in their area. Those school districts don’t balance FARM kids. They just draw a north-south or east-west boundary. I could be wrong, but it looks like WCS likely did use race or a proxy for race to draw its boundaries, as nothing else explains why it reaches way down past closer neighborhoods to neighborhoods south of Dempsey Road and north of Dublin-Granville Road to pull students up to its northern most school (Central).

Let’s dive deeper into the memorandum and district maps.