Letters to the Editor
-
Let me tell you how that's worked out
I live in a county where the schools are regulated at the county level. There are no school districts as such. There is no busing, at least no enforced busing. What they do is they allow parents, more or less, to send their children to any school in the county, space and resources permitting. The result is a chaotic mess of buses flying all over the county, children commuting more than an hour each way, some having to ride more than one bus. Moreover the schools that are in predominately black neighborhoods are shunned by BOTH black and white students. So the county turns those schools into "MAGNET" programs in a hope to change the racial balance of those schools from almost entirely black to a more mixed population while at the same time, getting the utilization of those schools up over the 60% mark. So then what happens is they have magnet programs in black neighborhoods and the black population of those school switches from almost entirely black to something mimicking the racial demographic of the county, about 30%. Then the Black Neighborhoods complain that they 're being pushed out of their own neighborhood schools by the upscale whites. Schools they weren't sending their kids to anyway. In the meantime the poor racially diverse neighborhoods send their kids all over the county and the end result is that while children go to better schools, their parents can't afford the time to travel 20-30 miles to the school to stay current with what's happening there. They don't attend parent teach meetings and they're generally disconnected from their children's education.