By City Councillor Felix Arroyo

Nearly 30 years ago, I moved to Boston from my native Puerto Rico confident that I would find a model of educational excellence. After all, I had heard much about the city's rich history and knew Boston as home to many renowned colleges and universities. I truly expected that the City of Boston would be a virtual educational utopia - a true "Athens to the World."

Imagine my surprise and disappointment to find my new home sharply divided over issues of race and grappling with a controversial school desegregation order. Rather than focusing on quality, frustration with persistent inequalities resulted in a busing plan. It was immediately clear that obtaining universally excellent schools would be a long-term goal and not a quick fix.

Today, parents deserve a choice of high-quality public schools close to their homes and a simpler school assignment process. In part as a response to this need, the City is considering a "neighborhood schools" model for our public elementary and middle schools. While we can begin to reform the school assignment process immediately, much work needs to be done before we can seriously consider neighborhood schools. Boston needs to plan, to improve, to reform, to carefully weigh options and to create new schools to relieve a sizeable classroom seat shortage in some neighborhoods. Though we must begin now, these problems currently confronting our public schools developed over time and we will need time to solve them.

Quality schools have broad and modern curriculum, superior teaching staff, top-notch administrators, and a safe environment for our children. A quality school system must also commit to ensuring student and staff diversity among different racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups. The City should not adopt a neighborhood schools model without retaining a significant element of parental school choice, which fosters community, diversity, competition and reform. Additionally, any assignment plan must serve the individual needs of bilingual and special education students. We must have "One City" committed to showing equity and respect for all of our school children no matter what their background or where they live.

I do support some modifications to the current school assignment process. Relatively simple changes to the overly complex lottery system should certainly be made to more fairly allocate spots in the City's top schools and to make the system more parent-friendly. I oppose increasing the number of assignment zones. Such a step would dramatically limit school choice and reduce diversity at many schools. To explore the goal of increasing the walk-zone preference in the future, we would first have to solve the existing inequity in school locations and quality.

Currently, 50 percent of seats at schools are reserved for students living with a one-mile walk-zone. To increase the walk zone preference to 75 percent, the city would have to offer equal access to quality schools in all neighborhoods.

The Roxbury neighborhood is short over 1,000 elementary school seats annually and none of the new school assignment plans under consideration would resolve this or other classroom seat shortages in several neighborhoods. The more aggressive neighborhood schools proposals would seriously worsen the problem by dramatically restricting the overall number and quality of public school options. The city should use readily-available U.S. census numbers to plan for future demographic trends and build school capacity in proximity to growing student populations.

In considering quality, the city has simply not done enough to ensure that what is working in Boston's more effective and popular schools is used to improve more troubled schools. At the very least, we must identify the most demonstrably effective educational procedures, practices, methodologies and programs and ensure that those are reproduced throughout the school system.

Only if we commit to improving schools that need it and building new schools wherever there is a demonstrated future need, could we talk about a 75 percent walk zone preference and opening-up hundreds of seats for neighborhood children in local schools.

Meanwhile, this approach would preserve 25 percent of seats for a diverse population of students from across each of the three exiting zones and sustain the benefits of school choice. But none of this can happen if we do not begin to plan and it cannot happen with today's existing inequities.

The City of Boston's public school system was the first and oldest school system in the United States. Though we all are and should be proud of this history, it is time to address anew our collective commitment to fulfilling the promise of public schooling for Boston's children of today. It is essential that public officials work closely with communities, parents, school administrators, teachers and students to ensure that our Boston schools are models of excellence.

We probably should also convene a School Quality Task Force and a School Location Task Force to seriously confront the basic underlying problems in our public school system. Rather than trumpet neighborhood schools as a cure-all, we must take the time to work together to improve all the public schools in all of our neighborhoods, build schools where they are needed, and hold on to key commitments to equity and respect.

The author is a Boston city councillor who served eight years on the Boston School Committee (two of them as president) and as an education advisor to Mayor Ray Flynn. His wife is a public school teacher in Boston and his five children either attend or have graduated from the Boston public schools.