North Highland Elementary an important history lesson
It would have been a mistake to follow through with an initial plan to abruptly close North Highland Elementary School without taking time to consult with the community or to make plans. To her credit, Superintendent Aurora Lora has backed off from that approach.
Also to its credit, the current OKCPS administration now acknowledges the need for wraparound services. In announcing a change to its plans after the school was burglarized and vandalized Friday night, the administration explained,
… district teams will work to staff the building with additional supports including an extra assistant principal, full-time counselor, and two social workers, all of which were allocated to North Highland prior to the consideration of a temporary closure.
North Highland problems in 2012 led to brief closure
In 2012, then-Oklahoman reporter (and current school board member) Carrie Coppernoll covered the brief closure of the school to discuss its rampant disorder. OKCPS said that half of the faculty was new, but turnover was a long-standing problem. It admitted, “Sometimes we may Band-Aid something when really we need a full 9-1-1 effort,”
The district pledged to get to the roots of the situation. Instead, it focused on the easy “areas of teacher training, including behavior, [and] classroom management.”
Segregation by any other name …
Many of the problems facing today’s North Highland neighborhood can be traced to the way the Oklahoma Industries Authority conducted urban renewal, wrecking a proud African-American community and the way that families were relocated to the Highland.
For unnerving accounts of how urban renewal created the same destruction across the North Highland Elementary an important history lesson - NonDoc: