David Andreatta

@david_andreatta

They say the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, meaning that children end up a lot like their parents.

Sometimes apples roll into another orchard, but mostly they just sit at the base of the trunk and fester until they eventually start complaining about the price of gasoline.

If you doubt the adage, look no further than Charlotte High School.

On any given day, more than one in five students don't bother showing up. In my world, that's akin to the Democrat and Chronicle's entire sports reporting staff treating every day like an N.F.L. bye-week.

If most success in life is due to just showing up, to paraphrase Woody Allen, no wonder barely a third of Charlotte students manage to graduate in four years.

To fix the problem, Superintendent Bolgen Vargas wants to shut the place down. But dissolving the administration and shuffling around a few teachers, which is what happens when a school shuts down (the building doesn't actually close), won't help the students.

Why? Because most of their parents don't care about their education.

That sounds like a sweeping generalization, but what other conclusion could be drawn from the fact that fewer than 10 parents attended a meeting Tuesday in the school auditorium where Vargas discussed his plan?

There are 450 students enrolled at Charlotte. That translates to several hundred adults who live with a Charlotte student. Yet only a sliver of them could be bothered to go to a meeting about a topic as crucial to their children's welfare as the fate of their school.

And one wonders why the students don't go to class? No-show parents raise no-show kids.

"That's 90 percent of the problem at that school, the parents don't show up," Kennetha DeBot, the mother of a Charlotte junior, told me after the meeting. "I tell you honestly; a lot of the parents just don't care."

More parents may have wanted to attend but couldn't for one reason or another.

Maybe they lacked transportation. Charlotte draws students from across the city and 79 percent of them qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator that they're poor.

Some parents may have been working or couldn't find a babysitter.

Perhaps others figured the proposal to close Charlotte, which the Board of Education still must approve, was a done deal and they'd just be wasting their time.

But those things don't explain why a Charlotte English teacher with 100 students recalled seeing just six parents at her parent-teacher conferences recently.

Nor do they shed any light on why just a few parents regularly attend a monthly breakfast with the principal, as DeBot recalled.

The turnout Tuesday was part of a pattern of parent-child absenteeism fueled by indifference.

When a superintendent's plans call for a child to change schools, parents find a way to drag themselves to an auditorium to hear him out if they really care.

Recall the parental outcry six years ago when the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester announced it would close 13 schools.

One of them, Good Shepherd School in Henrietta, had just 128 students. Yet more than 100 parents reportedly gathered for a meeting at the school to brainstorm ways to save it.

If Charlotte is dissolved, most of its students will enroll in another school or stay in the Charlotte building under a new administration.

Either way, one in five still won't walk through the door and the metal detectors and into class on any given day —and their parents still won't care one way or the other.

"What's going to change?" asked Nyterra Nunn, a Charlotte parent who is active at the school. "Since attendance is the issue, what's going to change if they have the students go to a new school?"

It's a question the Board of Education should consider.

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