An interim school superintendent in a suburb north of Chicago recently summed up the battle over redistricting in the school district:

Rafferty broke into a school board discussion on school boundaries Tuesday to express shock at the “exclusionary” attitudes that he said have surfaced in recent weeks. Rafferty said many of the emails and comments from parents and community members regarding proposed boundary changes have been “shocking, embarrassing and ugly.”

“We have families telling us they do not want this population of kids with their population of kids,” said Rafferty, a retired Schaumburg superintendent who has shared superintendent duties in District 112 since February.

“We have other families telling us, ‘Don’t you dare move my students or my neighborhood, but I would love for you to move X, Y and Z to another school to achieve a balance,'” Rafferty said…

His remarks came during a school board discussion of the administration’s recommended boundary changes to accommodate students from Lincoln Elementary School and Elm Place Middle School, which are closing at the end of the school year. Board members set aside the proposed map for a variety of reasons, including the discontent voiced by some parents over the number of low-income pupils attending Northwood Junior High.

This reminds me very much of what I thought was the best chapter in anthropologist Rachel Heiman’s recent book Driving After Class (see my quick review here). That chapter described how a large suburban district in New Jersey decided to move students around based on capacity in schools as well as by race and class. In that case, as a number of the less wealthy and non-white residents of the districts had suspected might happen, the wealthiest community was able to keep its students nearby and severely limit how many outside students were able to attend.

Wealthier and whiter suburbs – Highland Park has a median household income of over $122,000 and is over 92% white – tend to first try to limit poorer residents by limiting the number of cheaper housing units. If that is not completely successful, the next battleground can be schools as residents of such communities tend to prefer that their children go to school with other wealthier children.