by Jennifer Freeman, a member of the Community Education Council in District 3

Last Wednesday's Community Education Council meeting on school overcrowding in District 3, attended by hundreds of people, morphed into an impromptu rally about diversity.

CEC3's process for addressing overcrowding in District 3 is drawing to a close. Next Wednesday, the Community Education Council members will submit final votes on a resolution that involves both school relocations and redrawing zone lines.

Last week, some parents and educators who do not want the Center Schoolto move tried re-framing the overcrowding issue in racial terms. This led to an odd tableau of Upper West Side democracy, in which white audience members exercised their right to free speech by heckling a CEC member of color whose entire career has been devoted to increasing educational opportunities for minority students.

The confrontation sidestepped the fact that the CEC's resolution takes on a different issue, overcrowding, and is founded in values that benefit the entire community, including keeping siblings together at one school where possible, maximizing opportunities for the youngest students to attend school close to home, and maintaining District 3's kindergarten lottery, which gives kids the chance to go to any school in the district, as long as seats are available. The kindergarten lottery has been used to increase diversity, for instance by recruiting native Spanish speakers to dual language programs.

CEC3 members have long sought ways to preserve and increase diversity. Last year, they attended hearings and expressed concerns about diversity when the Department Of Education changed the Gifted & Talented admissions process. A recent report in the New York Times showed that these concerns were prescient: the new, centrally administered admissions system seems to have reduced the population of children of color in G&T classes this year. The City Council's education committee under Robert Jackson is looking at why this might have happened.

This coming Wednesday, people planning to attend the District 3 CEC meeting on overcrowding may have to pass through a demonstration about race, as Center School parents continue to try to divert attention away from the overcrowding issue and make a last minute argument that moving their school several blocks north, to a larger space in a building that will gain diversity from its presence, is somehow bad for the district.

I uphold the right to free speech by all parents and community members, and support the vibrant participation that this process has stimulated in District 3, but the resolution addressed a crisis of overcrowding, and has potential to improve the education of hundreds of children in the district for years to come. Let's keep our eyes on that prize.