Gentrification in JP — You Just Noticed?

In 1999, we made the last minute decision to enroll our daughter in the Boston Public Schools and got a seat at the .  To our surprise, everything was... fine.  She loved her school, she made friends and it was easy for us to take her there.  Smooth sailing.

The next year, when we took our daughter in for the first day of first grade, we noticed a dramatic shift.  The children who were coming off the buses and out of their cars weren't the same Latino and African-American students that had joined our daughter the year before. Many of them were white.  More importantly, they were all from very close to the school.

Did people miss the McLaughlin decision?  Did people miss the news about the parents who made the decision to overwhelm the selection process and pick the Manning en masse? Really?  Because while I was obviously tuned to hearing about it, I'm pretty sure I heard the Globe and WBUR pick it up too.

We had thought our younger children could go to the Manning, but because of the age difference, our next oldest child wouldn't be guaranteed a seat.  And because the Manning was the new place to be at BPS, her chances were slim in the lottery.  We crossed our fingers and chose Young Achievers, and we got lucky.  But that's another story for another day.

A year or two after our oldest graduated from the Manning, I met someone who did her Master's Thesis on the change at the school.  It was just a random meeting somewhere in JP as we juggled our kids, and I never saw this person again.  She'd interviewed many of the parents, and what she found confirmed some of the uglier things I'd heard.  The majority of the new parents were not concerned about the loss of economic and racial diversity at the school; many, in fact, were glad that their children would not have to be with children from lower income families who might present challenges to the class that would impede their children's learning.  But the funniest part was that some said that they felt the increased presence of same-sex parents compensated for the loss of the other diversities.  (Most of my LGBTQ friends find that as hilarious as I do.)

A few years later, I went to a BPS parents meeting with Superintendent Johnson shortly after she came to Boston.  There had been a budget cut, of course, and she was there in part to take our questions.  I shook my head when the Manning representative spoke about how they had lost their Title I funding.  I guess those low income kids were useful after all.

It is because of this experience that I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone as people start screaming about gentrification in JP.  That the screaming is at a fever pitch now — over a grocery store — makes me ill.  It takes Whole Foods to get people active about something that has been an issue for well over a decade?  It wasn't just the Manning, and it didn't stop a decade ago.  Where were they — any of them — when the Boston Archdiocese closed Our Lady of Lourdes and stopped serving the lower-middle income families who sent their children there?  

Why, JP, are you willing to scream when a terrible grocery store is closed, but not when our children are shoved aside?  Come on, finding our groceries is not as difficult as educating our children.

I can only blink when someone touts JP's diversity.  JP qualifies as diverse only if we're looking at numbers.  A real definition also needs to take into account segregation.  But that also is not a new problem here.

Wake me up when you want to talk about the real issues.