MASON -- When Mike and Melinda Kelly decided where to live and where to send their son to school, academic excellence, not race, drove their decisions.

        That mirrors a major theme that emerged from a new Enquirer poll on racial attitudes toward education.

        ''Money doesn't drive me, being happy and having a nice quality of life and a good family drives me,'' says Mr. Kelly, 40, a contract manager with Michelin North America. ''And part of that is being able to see your kids get educated.''

        Mr. Kelly transferred from Columbia, S.C., five years ago, and could have lived anywhere he wished in the area. After researching, he and his wife picked Mason, knowing they were one of the first black families to move there.

        The Kellys say they did it with the assumption they'd be in this area only for two or three years, and the strong reputation of Mason schools was an overriding factor.

        ''I wanted to keep my property value up, and that's a big part of it,'' says Mr. Kelly.

        Yet despite Mason City Schools' consistently high rankings in statewide tests and other criteria, the Kellys originally enrolled their son Michael Jr. at Marva Collins Preparatory School, a predominantly black private school nearly 20 miles away in Silverton.

        The intent, says Mrs. Kelly, was to get Michael a good education while keeping him steeped in his African-American heritage.

        But Michael had become friendly with several kids in the neighborhood, and was becoming interested in computers.

        So after six months, Michael transferred to Mason schools. The Kellys say that Mason was every bit as good as Marva Collins, which both say was ''excellent.''

        But Mason was closer, Michael went with his local playmates and he could take advantage of stronger computer resources. It didn't hurt that Michael's principal at Mason Middle School, Tanya McCall, is also African-American.

        Still, ''It was not an easy decision,'' says Mrs. Kelly, herself an educator -- she's assistant dean of instruction at Scarlet Oaks Career Development Center in Sharonville, which is part of Great Oaks Institute of Technology and Career Development.

        Mrs. Kelly says Michael had a lot of input, and the final decision was one ''by the entire family.'' She adds that they are not worried about Michael being the only African-American in most of his classes -- ''as long as he is treated equally and fairly.''

        ''My education is better here than at any other school I could be going to, including Marva Collins,'' says Michael, now 12 and an eighth-grader -- slightly ahead of the normal pace. ''And I really want to work with computers, and the technology at Mason is really outstanding.''

        Race still remains important to the family, however. They have taken vacations to Atlanta to visit Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthplace, Michael has worked with the Urban League in South Carolina on summer vacations and both Kellys say they continually ground their son in their heritage.

        ''He has more opportunity than African-Americans have ever had in this past century -- my father grew up a black man in the rural South, so you know how hard it was for him,'' Mr. Kelly says. ''I want to make sure he can work and live with people of all races. . . . I also want to make sure he knows he is a black male in America and the history behind that.''

        ONLINE EXTRA: Complete poll results and PDF of the report

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About this series
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How this poll was done
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