This is my shocked face
/GREENWICH — Western Middle School will retire its IB magnet program in favor of a new theme that administrators will announce sometime next year.
Western adopted the IB magnet theme in 2013 in hopes of attracting students from other parts of Greenwich and balancing out the school’s racial make up.Students of color comprise 55.9 percent of the overall population at Western
Parents prefer local schools for many reasons, not least of which is that they afford their children to make friends with other students in their own neighborhood. Walk to school and, as was the case with my own children, walk home with classmates and play at their houses, or bus the kids over to the other side of town and drag them back at end of the day? No brainer: even the parents of children in the western side of town expressed their objection to busing their own children to other districts.
This entire IB program, concocted at great expense to Greenwich taxpayers, was always a mere charade, meant to get the state off our back with its demand that we bus children around town (or merge Greenwich schools with Stamford’s) to achieve racial balance. Almost everyone involved knew that it would fail, and many of us (ahem) advocating filing a preemptive suit against the state on constitutional grounds. The town in its wisdom chose to proceed with this ridiculous effort to kick the can down the road, and now we’re on to something else.
Tell the state to pound sand, afford parents who want their children to matriculate with white children the opportunity to enroll them in other districts, and end this circus.
