The case of Yolanda Hill, the Rochester mother who is accused of unlawfully sending her children to Greece schools, has certainly highlighted public dissatisfaction with Rochester's schools. What it ought to highlight, though, is the community's failure to get its arms around the issue of urban education - and do something about it.

Blame city teachers, principals, school board members, and superintendents if you like. They're not the problem. The problem - as I've said so often that I'm feeling like a broken record - is the district's concentration of poverty. It's criminal, frankly, that this community keeps searching for another reason so many Rochester children do so poorly in school.

Up until now, I've haven't been a great supporter of charter schools. They drain money from the City School District. They tend to skim off students whose families are most involved in their education, increasing the district's concentration of students from poor, often troubled families. The self-selection of the student population can unrealistically boost charter schools' achievement records.

But we need to save the children we can. So I'll jump on the charter bandwagon - especially if, as is the case with the Genesee Community Charter School, the schools are adequately integrated, poor and not-poor. It's not a coincidence that Genesee Community, the Rochester charter school whose students are doing the best, also has the lowest poverty rate.

Another reason for endorsing charters like Genesee Community, by the way, is that they attract middle and upper-income families. Four years ago, responding to a piece I wrote criticizing charter schools, a Rochester mother chastised me. If it weren't for Genesee Community Charter School, she said, her family would have moved out of the city.

Bill and I take a long walk through our city neighborhood every morning, right about the time that school buses are picking up children. And while our neighborhood doesn't have many children, there are some. And a fair number of them get on those school buses every morning and head to non-public schools. Is there nothing we can do to attract them to city schools? Have we tried?

Something else we see: young parents pushing strollers. They obviously like our neighborhood, but I know what will happen once those babes get a little older. The parents will start looking for a home in the suburbs. Is there nothing we can do to keep them here?

The experience of our oldest daughter - herself a product of Rochester's public schools - may be instructive. She and her family live in Chicago, which has a variety of magnet schools: elementary as well as secondary. For several years, they lived in a fast-becoming-hot neighborhood. But 90 percent of the children who attended the neighborhood school were poor. And the test scores were awful.

Our daughter and son-in-law first tried to get their kindergarten-age son into several of Chicago's magnet schools. Due to those schools' popularity, he was put on a waiting list. And so they moved - to another city neighborhood with a better achievement record.

The point is, they had choices. Within the city's public school system.

If we really cared about the education of the city's poorest children, we would be doing everything we could to create numerous schools with low poverty rates. We would pull out all the stops to keep middle and upper-income families in the city. We would be creating partnerships between the city school district and suburban schools. But that would take something that's sorely lacking on this issue: community leadership.

The brightest hope I've seen is Bill Cala's plan for a campus school at Nazareth College. If every college and university in this county followed the Cala-Nazareth example, we could create exciting, exceptional campus schools that would serve city students - and that suburban parents would sell their souls to get their children into.

So far, though, only Bill Cala and Nazareth have stepped up.