Saturday, August 19, 2000
RAMSEY: Education
Littlest schools matter too
The coming year will tell us something about who we are here in Cincinnati, as we watch to see if private backers can raise $26 million to make a world-class arts school happen.
Building that school will tell us something about ourselves, but it will not tell us everything.
A bond between public schools and private supporters is a wondrous thing and all too rare, especially in urban districts. So is having a highly visible, one-of-a-kind arts campus where professional artists team up with students in close and continuing relationships.
Indeed, it is a point of pride, a place where — if we are lucky — a city and its schools can come together once again after distance and distrust has grown tall between them.
Who knows? It may even make the rest of the nation stand up and take notice, start a good buzz about Cincinnati Public Schools. We can dream of the day a Cincinnatian will get on an airplane and his seat mate, upon hearing where he's from, will comment not on stadiums, but on state-of-the-art schools.
Yes, that would surely be worth something.
Much more to it
But it is a different sort of city altogether that wins not merely passing national interest, but continued local esteem.
That goes only to a city that loves all of its public schools, not just the new, shiny ones. That is a city where big-name boards of supporters flock to the smallest of schools, in the most forgotten corners of the city. That is a city where the district's “showpiece” is never a place, but the honestly cared for and adequately educated children it produces year after year after year.
And Cincinnati has not yet become that sort of city.
Part of the debate raised by this new school has centered on equity issues. Some district parents wondered how the district could commit $26 million of its own money to one building, while seven other schools languish in disrepair. It is a troubling point. But the larger issue, the looming issue, isn't inequity of funding. It is inequity of interest, pride and ownership.
Unforgivable indifference
At heart, we know that what will make this new school succeed isn't simply — or even primarily — the $52 million investment. It is the fact that people will go there, volunteer there, see a performance there, consider sending their child there. They will speak of it with pride and expectation. They will know its address.
Does it not say something, then, that many of us who could find this yet-to-be-built school on a map couldn't come within 2 miles of locating handfuls of elementary schools that have existed in this city for 100 years?
And, worse yet, that we greet every mention of these schools (in which we've never set foot) with disdain or disinterest?
That is the question that's the hard one to answer, the ethical thorn that sticks in this city's heel. And whatever fingers are being pointed — at school board members, at private backers, for constructing this new building — there is still the issue of utter, unforgivable indifference that singles out all the rest of us.
May the new arts school be built, and may we be glad of it.
There is no danger in loving it too much, only in loving those quiet, struggling schools too little.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202.
RAMSEY ARCHIVE
