Our auto insurer maintains a dedicated office for people moving to Massachusetts; its staff cautioned us that getting our cars registered in the Bay State “is a process for which you’ll want to plan plenty of time.” This prediction that proved correct, but not fatal. After being administratively hassled and humbled at the Registry of Motor Vehicles we succeeded in one visit and left with license plates to begin our new lives as Massholes. Afterward we felt both wiser and quietly victorious, and we assumed that we’d cleared the final hurdle of a challenging relocation process.
And then we attempted to register our children for school.
This turned out to be the actual adventure, the likes of which I have never experienced.* The level of documentation and the demands for specificity and recency took days of my life to resolve (days that as a newly settled pastor in an entirely new state I would certainly have otherwise known what to do with). After providing not only birth certificates and medical records but the front page from our newly executed mortgage loan, a cable bill, and an affidavit of residency, I was informed that we would also be required to provide a town-official utility statement. Being newly moved to a town with infrequent utility billing, we possessed no such thing, so off to the town offices I went. The goal: to establish proof of our water and sewer account and thereby (finally) allow my kindergartner to enter the school that under both Massachusetts state law and local town rules he was in fact mandated and compelled to attend.
I was directed to a staff member at town hall, to whom I explained what I needed, and asked if she could provide the documentation. She said she thought that she could, after confirming, “The school wants this, you said?” To which I exclaimed, “Yes,” and then added confessionally, “I have never had to jump through so many hoops in my life. I assume the blood test is next; it was easier to register our cars.” And this is when my Massachusetts education actually began, for the clerk replied, “Well, it has to be this way; otherwise every kid in New Bedford would cross the bridge to use the schools here.”
I believe I said something intelligent, such as “I . . . what?,” and she responded along the lines of, “You don’t want your kids going to school with everyone who wants to be over here. You have to prove where you live.”
There ended that conversation; I did leave with a water bill, and that was that. I obviously haven’t forgotten the interaction, though; I think of it frequently, in fact, when we talk about things like housing, which is fundamentally a conversation about who gets to live where, and how. And let’s be clear: the clerk, in that moment, was simply an agent of the combined system. She didn’t make the rules. She didn’t define the playing field. She was simply, as was everyone I dealt with in the school system, carrying the water for the structures we’ve inherited and decided to accept and enforce as our own.
These structures, like the doctrines of property law to which they are currently tied, appear to have existed forever, and we suppose them utterly impervious to change. In reality, though neither permanent nor inalterable, school district boundaries and their enforcement are astonishingly powerful, intensely political, and wickedly purposeful in enacting white supremacy and upholding the social structures upon which the reproduction of racialized outcomes depends. And we must understand this: enacting white supremacy and upholding the structures that reproduce racialized disparities is indeed what is going on here, whether any of us who are involved harbor this specific intent or not. This is the nature of structural oppression: individual intent to harm is not the key that powers the system.
In considering what’s happening (and for whom and to whom) in defining and enforcing a school district boundary, it might interest us to know that the public school registration process is not like this everywhere. It’s mildly time consuming anywhere you go, but in, for example, Lawrence Kansas, you simply show up at the admin building or the office of your neighborhood school and with a couple of documents you’re all set. Lawrence also prides itself on its school system, and like Fairhaven, is a town that considers itself better than its neighbors. In other words, Lawrence maintains the same vested interest in paying for “its own” and not “those other kids.” A difference between Lawrence and Fairhaven manifests not in attitude, particularly, but in how its actual perimeter works: midwestern cities tend to be much more self-contained than New England towns.
Lawrence, Kansas has clear boundaries and real distance between it and the next education-providing municipality; its students are thus inarguably its students. Differences exist in facilities and outcomes within the district, in some cases fairly egregiously; which school you attend within Lawrence matters. But there is not the matter of an unremarkable-looking street marking an urban boundary at which one city ends and another town, and thus an entirely separate library post office police department and of course, school district, begins.
Town-on-town boundaries are intensely interesting places of negotiated belonging and differential outcomes, with histories that reach far beyond the lifespans of anyone living, and probably the memories of anyone before that. Town on town boundaries, in fact, have the potential to be not just segregated, but segregating, and exploring these dynamics was the work of EdBuild, an advocacy organization, data visualization think tank, and community partner in the area of educational equity. EdBuild closed its doors in July of 2020 after posting a last batch of reports; its CEO reflected on its closure for ChalkBeat.
In 2016 EdBuild produced a data visualization dashboard called FaultLines designed to highlight the most segregating school boundaries in the country. In that initial report, New Bedford was among the communities whose students were in the process of being particularly compromised by funding, access, and outcome discrepancies based on whether a student lived in one block of a particular street or in another area several blocks away that happened to belong to a different town. The school boundary at issue in this case was actually not the line between New Bedford and Fairhaven, though as the gatekeeping on the Fairhaven side suggests, the differences between the two communities are in some ways stark. The urgent focus was, instead, on the other side of New Bedford, along its dividing line with Dartmouth, where the differential is even more pronounced.
To sum up, some street addresses deliver quantifiably different school experiences, and with them, different outcomes on measures such as college graduation and adult income. And other addresses, meanwhile, deliver to children a set of goods and services that could be deemed—and in many cases are—substandard in the legal sense providing a free and appropriate public education.
So why should we care? And do we owe our children—no, that’s not it—do we owe other people’s children—better than this?
What do we as individuals, and what do we as a society, rightly owe to other people’s children?
More on that next week.
j
*Women of color have certainly experienced it, though, and at least two have gone to jail in the process. Kelley Williams-Bolar and Tanya McDowell were both fined and incarcerated after enrolling their children in school districts where the districts maintain that their children did not belong. The legal cause of action involved was theft and fraud, which makes these prosecutions (in one case, of a working single mom who sent her kids to school in the neighboring district where their grandparents lived, and in another, of a mom who was homeless) an apt and rather horrifying lens through which to consider the Varsity Blues college admission fraud cases.
Sitting here in Alabama while reading this I couldn't help thinking "Wow, she's describing some places here for sure...". So I wasn't surprised to go to the EdBuild site and see the Birmingham/Vestavia Hills boundary showing up in the top 50 list. Something not in their particular research (already-existing boundaries) but nearby - that made the news - was the 2018 attempt by another Bham suburb to create its own schools system. The attempt was knocked down by Federal courts as being intentionally racially discriminatory. https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2018/02/federal_appeals_court_rules_ga.html