A few small things:

1. This semester I'm taking an english class (yes, an english class) called film studies. It's laughably easy and basically means that 2-3 days a week I get to come to school and spend an hour and a half watching classic movies. Basically, it's the coolest thing ever. Last week we watched Annie Hall. In school. I watched Annie Hall in school. (somewhere, Bre is cringing). I had almost forgotten how ridiculously excellent that film is. You know the scene where Alvie and Annie are at a party and this guy is trying to get them to try coke and Alvie asks how much it costs and when the guy says $20,000 he picks it up to look at it and then accidentally sneezes into it? ahahaha. Amazing.

2. I'm leaving on Thursday for Durango for the Durango Independent Film Festival. Durango, it should be noted, lies in the exact, dead-center of nowhere. It's a seven hour drive southwest of Denver, through towns whose welcome signs say "home of the fighting [insert high school football team's name here]" and whose main street is the two lane interstate that runs through them. That's southern Colorado for you. I'm still planning to try to make it over to Telluride while I'm there, which is about an hour from Durango and similarly situated far from everything I know and love. I'll keep you posted.

3. There was a long article in the Denver Post this morning about diversity at my school. I think the whole thing is worth reading (plus I interviewed the woman who wrote it for my documentary and think she's really cool), but some highlights:

The Denver School of the Arts has, in 16 years, grown into one of the most exclusive public schools in the Rocky Mountain region, admitting less than a third of the students who apply to get in every year.

In auditions, artistic prowess trumps grades, determination, hardship and whether applicants even have a Denver address.
The school's parents and advocates say this unwavering focus on talent has produced a shining star of academic excellence and artistic passion in a struggling urban school district.

But a byproduct of this exclusivity is a stark reality: DSA's student population does not reflect the rest of Denver Public Schools.

Almost 30 percent of the school's 880 students live outside Denver. Twelve percent of DSA's students live in poverty, and about 35 percent are minority.

Districtwide, 65 percent of students come from impoverished households and 76 percent are students of color. About 5 percent of DPS students come from outside the city."

annnddd...

Is racial and socioeconomic diversity a high-enough good that educational institutions ought to take it into account when selecting students? It's a question all levels of American education have long struggled with.

DSA senior Ryan Brown, who recently got into Yale, said there is "silence" around the issues of racial diversity.
"We tend to overplay the arts aspect ... we're all unique and that sort of thing," she said. "Who's going to make a school a more interesting place? Is it going to be interesting if everyone who goes here is the same type of kid and reflects the same kind of background?"

I enjoy being quoted in the paper, even it's for saying rambling, only semi-coherent things. But in all seriousness, this is a major issue, not just at my school but at public magnet schools in every school district in the US. I am of the opinion that if affluent, well-funded magnet schools in poor school districts are serving only the district's most wealthy students, they don't have any right to exist. Maybe that's harsh, but think about it. If they're not in those types of magnets, those kids (myself included) can and will go to private schools/public schools in high property-tax neighborhoods and take private/after school art classes and still get an excellent education and be prepared for college and all that. The people the district NEEDS to be reaching out to are kids who will be shut out of good educational, and in this case, artistic opportunities if they don't get a chance to go to a school like this.

At the same time, I do NOT believe the solution to issues of racial and socioeconomic isolation in public school systems can be solved by magnet schools alone, and I think it's silly to place all the blame for such problems on schools like mine. What about all the neighborhood schools that are so bad that less than 5% of their students are passing the state standardized tests (and there are schools like this in Denver)? If those schools never get better, there will always be kids who lose out because they don't know about/can't get into magnets/better schools. I hate to watch the district parade the success of its arts school, its IB program, its new science and technology high school, because it diverts attention from the fact that this is still an impoverished, struggling school district that graduates less than 50% of its students. And needless to say, those 50% who drop out are, by and large, not the kind of kids served by DSA or the IB program.

4. That was not supposed to be so long. My bad.

5. I remembered over winter break all those books we raffled off at the end of TASP, and how I really wanted to read some of the ones I didn't get (I started reading the one I did get, Howard Zinn's history of SNCC, but it turns out that from the vantage point of 2007, Zinn-on-black-people-circa-1965 turns out to be a whole lot less radical than you'd think). So I finally went out and got Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: something something elaborate subtitle psychology! race! and The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Both are excellent and come highly recommended to this TASP audience. Especially if any of the stuff I've rambled about in my last few posts about school segregation has touched a nerve with you, you have to pick up The Shame of the Nation. It's way too well done to be passed over.

6. Dang, this was a much longer post than I thought it would be.

7. Seriously though, this is ME we're talking about. Did you really believe me when I said "a few small things"?

8. THE END.