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Friday, January 11, 2008
No Boys Allowed: Right Or Wrong?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Single-sex education is growing in metro Atlanta.
Several private schools — including Lovett, Pace Academy and Wesleyan — began separating girls and boys in certain grades for certain subjects this school year. Atlanta Public Schools also opened two single-gender middle schools (one for boys and one for girls) this past August.
Now, the state’s first single-sex public charter school will open next school year.
Ivy Preparatory Academy in Gwinnett County, which will only accept girls, joins Atlanta’s boys-only B.E.S.T. Academy at Benjamin S. Carson and girls-only Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy as the first public schools (in recent years) to cater entirely to one sex.
You may recall that Ivy Prep had a hard time gaining approval for its program. Gwinnett’s Board of Education rejected the proposal twice before the school’s founders sought help from the State Board of Education.
Gwinnett administrators were concerned the campus would be discriminatory because there wasn’t a similar option for boys, as there is in Atlanta. They still hold that view, even though the state board approved the school’s charter this week.
Private schools, of course, can do as they please with their academic programs. But if a public campus — paid for with tax dollars — wants to serve one group of students to the exclusion of another, is that acceptable?
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