10/09/11 Ham Ave PTA President And President-Elect Say Candidates Wrong About Backcountry Parents Not Being Willing To Drive Their Kids To Ham Ave

To the editor:

In response to a question about the viability of magnet programs, at least two candidates at Friday's Board of Education candidate forum said that people would not drive their kids in from the backcountry to attend Hamilton Avenue School.

As magnet parents who made the choice to drive our children to Ham Ave, from some distance away (in one case, central Greenwich, in the other, Glenville), we strongly disagree.

The real question is not how far you will drive to take your child to school, but rather what the school offers to make it worth the drive. Dedicated staff, limited class size, and special programming are some of the things that define magnet programs and make them attractive to parents. The entire idea of magnet schools is to provide enrichment that pulls students in from other areas.

With these incentives, magnet schools will bring in outside students and provide the needed increases to school diversity. Without them, there is no reason for parents to go out of their way to choose a more distant school.

We should be constantly striving to make magnet programs more robust and attractive, not only to encourage parents from outside the neighborhood to bring their children in, but to benefit the neighborhood children and enrich their education, as the magnet programs are intended to do.

Mark Radzin
Peter Bernstein

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