News From Town

At the risk of getting in trouble, I won't use the names of the towns involved, but I wanted to relate what all happened yesterday. I guess to do that, I gotta start back in the 70s. Back then, the schools were still segregated. A law was passed to end that, making it so that, say, if a child lives in District A, that child would be legally forced to attend the school in District A.

That way, the racial makeup of the schools would depend on the racial makeup of the schools' districts' population, and nothing else. Good policy, but since then, some issues have cropped up.

In the county, there are 3 K-12 schools. School A is the big one, the one for town. B & C are each about 10 miles out, and are both much smaller. As far as racial makeup goes, School A is predominately black, being in the "urban" area, or at least as close to it as we get around here. B & C are mostly white, since they are out in the country. The population roughly matches that racial makeup, but recently the ratios have been skewing. Part of it is parents transferring their children to the smaller schools, seeing those schools as being A> better academically (and those schools have done better on state tests and such), B> better funded (smaller schools would have less children to spread the money around for), and C>. I guess the nicest way I can put it is that, for many parents (and some kids), a predominately white school would be preferable to a predominately black school.


Well, at a board meeting Tuesday, the state came by, and said that with the situation as it is, it basically constitutes segregation. (They also claimed that school A has been "clustering" black students and white students). It was decided that effective immediately, every student in the county would have to attend whichever district he or she lives in.

The decision means that kids who monday would be attending School B (and who may have gone there all their lives) , as of Wednesday they would be attending School A. Did I mention that school starts in 3 weeks?

Soooo, yesterday comes. I'm at one of the schools working, come back to the office, and there's a crowd gathered. And when I say crowd, I mean one rung below a mob. I pull around back, sneak in the back door, and try n figure out what the deal is. (I hadn't know about any of this, BTW) More than a hundred kids n parents, including several babies, in 95 degree heat, outside. And that was before the news camera showed up.

Eventually it was decided that the situation would be postponed until next year. Cheer goes up from the crowd. Everyone's happy. At least until they got home and realized that next year, everyone that's going to School B who would've had to swap this year... they're gonna still have to swap next year.

Oy vey.