10 GROUNDCOVER NEWS ANN ARBOR SCHOOLS FEBRUARY 24, 2023 Slush to STEAM — the gentrification that comes with "upgrading" schools When I was in fourth grade, the news came out that my elementary school would soon be remodeled, revamped and renamed. No longer would it just be Northside Elementary; now, it was Ann Arbor STEAM at Northside. Even as a 10-year-old I could objectively see why they were doing this kind of upgrade: the administration was a mess, there were more unused classrooms than used ones because there were 188 kids stretched among the six grades taught there. VHS tapes were still the most common form of media at our school in 2014. Despite the fact that these new upgrades appeared good, there was something deep down that made me feel like something wasn’t right about the way in which they were making all these changes. As time marched on, the school became more and more unrecognizable from what it used to be, more and more different from how I remembered it. And no, I’m not talking about the multi-million dollar new gym, or the iPads guaranteed to every STEAM student, or even the massive blue squares they used for the exteriors of the building additions; those were the changes that were paraded around at countless celebrations of the completion of the “new” school. Those aren’t LIOR COOPER Groundcover contributor the differences I’m talking about. It started in 5th grade. We had retained most of our original Northside cohort going into that school year, the first year of the STEAM experiment, but our grade had nearly doubled in size from the sheer number of new students coming to the school. Our whole school experienced a population boom: our school of 188 students suddenly grew to 401. This sudden jump in population also meant a steep demographic shift within both my cohort and my school as a whole. Within a single year, Northside went from being a school where 51% of the students were economically disadvantaged in the 2013-14 school year, to a school where that percentage was 25% in the 2014-2015 school year. My grade went from having exactly half of us being considered economically disadvantaged to only 34%. This trend hasn’t changed since that first year of the new school, either: In the 2021-2022 school year, 16% of the student body as a whole were considered economically disadvantaged. This change was not because the economic situations of the families already at Northside were suddenly improved; This was because new families — richer families — were becoming a part of the now “new-andimproved” STEAM community. Families that had been going to Northside for possibly generations — the school had been around for around eighty years at that point — felt sidelined by the district and “progress-at-all-costs” mentality when it came to changes with the school. Before becoming STEAM, Northside was a Title 1 school, meaning at least 40% of its student body is considered low income. With that Title 1 status comes funding targeted towards helping the families of these economically disadvantaged students. Even with its flaws, Northside used its Title 1 money to really help ensure students were on grade level, even if they left students who were above grade level (like me, for instance) with nothing to do but read since we already understood the material being taught. Post-STEAM transformation, the school was no longer a Title 1 school, but it’s not like STEAM really needed the funding. They used their sudden influx of money from the district to help push above-grade-level students to go as far in their academic journey as they could go, meaning a number of my peers ended up entering high school ready to take calculus. On the other hand, they gave nearly no funding to helping students who were below grade level, who are often those same kids who are considered “economically disadvantaged.” The sudden drop in how many low-income kids there are at this one school, as well as the demoralizing lack of academic support they receive, speaks truth to the gentrification that has been taking place all over Ann Arbor for decades. You cannot revamp, remodel, and rename without ensuring that everyone impacted by that change can be properly and equitably supported. With each year that the issues I outlined with STEAM go ignored, more and more kids run the risk of being academically and socially left behind by this enigma of a school. -
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