West St. Paul district draws up plans for more magnets

The West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan School District is developing plans for three magnet schools intended to increase educational choices, balance integration and attract more students living within its boundaries.

Under the plan, Moreland Elementary would focus on arts and health sciences, Pilot Knob Elementary would become a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) school, and Heritage Middle would become an environmentally focused STEM school.

District officials are preparing to apply for a federal magnet school grant program and could seek as much as $7 million over three years to help fund the initiative, says Jay Haugen, district superintendent. The grant program is designed to help districts promote student diversity in their schools.

About 23 percent of the students who live in the district are minorities, but 38 percent of the district's students are minorities. What's more, almost 40 percent of students who live in the district do not attend the district's public schools -- a high percentage for an inner-ring suburban area.

Haugen and other district leaders say that's because the district has some very attractive charter and private schools that draw local students, including St. Thomas Academy and Convent of the Visitation.

According to the district's voluntary desegregation plan, a recent study published by the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School shows the best time to establish a magnet school is when the district's minority population is between 30 and 40 percent. The plan also projects that the district's minority population will continue increasing in the next few years.

"We are a first-ring suburb and we have some differences in our schools," said Robin Rainford, school board chair. If successful, the magnet schools would reduce the percentage of minorities at schools in the district, and eliminate any need to redraw school attendance boundaries, "which break up traditional neighborhoods," Rainford said.

West St. Paul district leaders believe the magnet school concept can succeed because they've had success with the Garlough Environmental Magnet School, which began serving students a curriculum based on environmental principles four years ago.

The new curriculum has won over educators and families. For the second consecutive year Garlough has been lauded by an education association, and its enrollment has grown by nearly 50 percent in three years, to 410 students this year from 270 in 2007.

"That's mainly students from their own neighborhoods," Haugen said of the enrollment growth at Garlough. "That's what we're planning for our other three schools."

Garlough's success isn't normal for a modern-day magnet school. The concept got its start in the 1960s as a way to integrate schools without forced busing. But many magnet schools these days are just as segregated as nearby public schools.

"Putting a label on a school as a magnet doesn't guarantee anything," says Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at Macalester College. "You have to have strong programs that suit people's needs.