What’s the Real Issue at Capo Unified?

Under different circumstances, parents would be exultant. Instead of their children going to high school at an overcrowded campus and sitting in portable classrooms, they’d be going to a new, uncrowded school. And instead of their freshman or sophomore children attending high school with juniors and seniors, the new school would be for underclassmen only.

Such a deal, huh? Where do we sign up, and how long is the line to get in?

You bet. Just ask Capistrano Unified School District trustees, who have offered up such a school and have been greeted with talk about secession and recall, the proverbial one-two punch of local government.

The issue in South County is as fresh as this week’s headlines, but in other ways as old as the hills. It’s the tale of white

parents who don’t want their children reassigned to schools outside their existing boundary lines -- especially if it means their children will be attending school with more minority students.

A generation or so ago, it was fashionable to slap the “racist” tag on those white parents, and in some cases, the tag fit neatly. But guess what? As some of those who applied the racist tag began having school-age children of their own and faced the same situations, they became much less “principled.”

In short, some who shouted the loudest about integration put their own kids in private schools or moved away when it came time for their precious offspring to sit next to a minority kid. They loved social experiments for other people’s kids.

Now, hundreds of parents in the Capo district have made it clear they don’t want their kids sent to San Juan Hills High School, which opens next year. The school district, trying to alleviate overcrowding and create some ethnic balance, has redrawn school boundary lines -- meaning some students from more well-off families in the 50,000-student district will be going to school next year with classmates from less-affluent homes.

The glib retort is to ask

affluent families what they

expect will happen in a society that loves cheap immigrant

labor but has less interest in educating those laborers’ children.

Glibness, however, is not the order of the day.

So if we’re not going to play the ethnic card, what can we say to the protesting parents?

We can start by acknowledging that students from lower-

income families often perform more poorly in school than

their affluent brethren. The reasons are varied and vast, but often stem from situations -- like family expectations or early-educational experience -- that only tangentially relate to ethnicity.

The parental fear of high-achieving students is that their child will suffer in a school that spends inordinate time and resources to pull up the struggling students. Parents might well support integrated schools, but given that their own children have but one trip through the K-12 system, they don’t want to experiment with them.

That isn’t a racist point of view. It’s a concern that can and should be discussed outside the boundaries of ethnicity or race. Parents of high achievers have every right to ask administrators what they’ll do to ensure that their college-bound child is challenged.

Not all students are created equal. Asking for that would be way, way over the top.

But while we shouldn’t cavalierly dismiss family traditions in attending school, this is the modern age. Traditions change. New schools open and recruit new students.

Lots of students down through the decades have been reassigned.

The subject is more complex for the space I have to write, but here’s my final verse: If the district lines in Capo Unified are what they are, the protesting parents should make some noise. They should shout from their red rooftops that the new school won’t sacrifice educational excellence.

You like tradition? That would be a great one to start.