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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]...and also location.  It is not at all convenient to Ward 3.[/quote]

Ward 5 is becoming much more diverse, but my family was on the cutting edge of this trend and our kid is now a 10th grader.  We were actually the only white family in our census block for a few years!  That is no longer the case.  I expect more white in the coming decade as more kids who live nearby and are white enter high school.

The other thing is that, even as someone who went to a high school that was very diverse (more black than white students) I was nervous about sending my kid to a school where he would be part of the 4.7% of white students.  (The 3% number is wrong and the 4.7% number has held for two years, so white kids haven't been the "onlies" at the school for quite some time if ever.)

But, that said, I went to school in the South in the 90s.  Racial tensions were much higher then [b]because segregation was not a distant memory [/b]but something fellow students' parents had lived through.  I think enough time has passed that it's a bit different now than then.  It's pretty easy for us parents to project our experiences onto our kids, but they're really living in a very different time than the one we grew up in.[/quote]

A bit of history about McKinley Tech -- before school integration, it was a whites-only STEM school and was highly regarded.

After integration, the demographics flipped VERY quickly (became overwhelmly Black within a couple of years, bc whites fled), but the STEM part stayed, so it was one of the only schools where smart, black high school students could take very difficult science courses with real labs, etc. This is a very recent history, of course, and I've spoken to people who lived this (went to McKinley Tech in the 60s and 70s).

It's a good school. It was a white school, and then it was a mostly black school. Now it seems to be actually integrating, which is wonderful -- that was always the goal!

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