Reflections on Entitlement and Bias from a Museum District Parent
By: Shannon Lindbloom
Tags: Rezoning, Museum District, Integration, Richmond, Education

“I believe very strongly in our public school system and look forward to supporting the schools that my girls attend. I simply wish to make our desire to be zoned for a fully utilized neighborhood school known as you get to work serving our community. Allowing people to attend schools they aren’t zoned for seems like sticking a band-aid on a serious injury; I believe RPS should get neighborhoods excited to attend their zoned schools. Just saying, ‘Oh well, you can just lottery into another school like everyone else in your neighborhood’ means that we will be robbed of that community that your local elementary school should provide.”

I wrote these words to my then school board representative, Glen Sturtevant, nearly seven years ago when I was the parent of a baby and a toddler. At the time my neighborhood, the Museum District, was zoned for John B. Cary Elementary School, a school I have never stepped foot in. Cary was 21% white at that time, a percentage that reflects the number of white children attending elementary school in Richmond Public Schools as a whole. The oldest school accreditation data I could find was for 2013, when Cary was accredited with warning, having passed all but the English SOL. Mr. Sturtevant and I discussed whether the Museum District should go east to majority-white William Fox or west to majority-white Mary Munford, and I concluded, “Ultimately . . . we’d be happy with being redistricted for either school. We believe both are great schools, and that’s of course the most important thing.”

What did I mean by great schools? What did I mean by a fully utilized neighborhood school? What did I mean that I was being robbed of a community? As we know, the end result was the closure of Clark Springs Elementary School and the rezoning of those majority-black students into John B. Cary, while my majority-white neighborhood was rezoned to Fox. You can read about that process in the article “Solidifying Segregation or Promoting Diversity? School Closure and Rezoning in an Urban District.” I remember at the time feeling that it was unfair that wealthy people like me in neighboring zones got to go to “great schools,” while I was zoned for a school that I believed wasn’t. After all, I invested a lot in the city with my property taxes; didn’t the city want to reward me and keep me around?

What I failed to do was visit the school I deemed as “not great,” or to speak to anyone whose children currently attended it. What I failed to consider was that for me to get what I wanted, other children, children whose parents probably were not able to pay $7,000 a year for them to go to preschool, or who probably didn’t have stay-at-home mothers who could drive a mile or two to school, were being denied the opportunity to attend more integrated and well-resourced schools. While I argued that surely no one would expect me to go to a school 1.1 miles from my home when there was a perfectly good school 0.9 miles from my home, children in the Randolph Village Apartments were being rezoned from a school that was 0.2 miles away to a school that was 1.4 miles away. From my actions we can infer that I believed my convenience mattered more than theirs, my wishes mattered more than theirs. My children mattered more. Clark Springs students were literally robbed of their neighborhood school, but I didn’t bat an eye. I gained a neighborhood school in the process, but only because I defined whom I wanted to be my neighbors.

It wasn’t overnight that I saw my past self through a new lens. I happened to attend a talk by Dr. Genevieve Siegel-Hawley about the benefits of integration and the very intentional ways that white people resist it. I grappled with a painful incident on the playground when my preschooler, whom I naively had taught to be “color-blind,” loudly repeated what a white child told her about black people (or, in her “we don’t talk about race” parlance, “people with brown skin”). I realized that I wasn’t modeling diverse friendships for my children, and that surrounding myself with other white and wealthy people didn’t tend to facilitate them. I realized that it is my responsibility to teach my children about race and the way it has been weaponized to oppress people, not to pretend that it doesn’t exist. The more I learned, the more I realized how much I don’t know. The more I searched my heart, the more entitlement and bias I found.

We have an opportunity today to act out of intention, not fear. We can be honest about how it feels wrong for our children to be the minority, even when we choose to live in a city where that’s the reality, and then we can chalk those feelings up to entitlement and move on. We can research the benefits of integrated schools and reassure ourselves that the research does not indicate that already privileged students will fall behind. We can put as much stock in developing empathy, civic-mindedness, and flexibility as we do in test scores. We can value the enormous benefits of removing children from previously isolated settings more than we value our own convenience. We can stop constructing elaborate rationales for moving other people’s children, lengthening other students’ commutes, rezoning other people’s neighborhoods. We can expand who falls under the definition of like me and neighbor.

I am grateful my children were too young to be aware of my actions during the last rezoning process. I don’t want my children to look back on their childhood and think, “Remember when Mom made sure we didn’t have to go to school with too many poor kids and children of color?” I want them to say, “Remember when Mom taught us that the world doesn’t revolve around us? Remember when she taught us that we are responsible for how our actions affect other people? Remember when we stood up for integration, and we got to be part of something special?”

If you’d like to be part of something special too, please sign this petition.