Minorities to schools: Listen to us

The new school year was to come laden with goodies for the black and Latino kids of Greensboro's south side. Targeting overcrowded schools, city officials intended to hire 34 new teachers, build a new high school, and fire up a trendy achievement program at one middle school.

Disturbed over a growing disconnect between the theories of "educrats" and the realities of black and Latino culture, parents saw the district's flurry of bureaucratic beneficence more as "politricks" than real help for their kids.

In the board's well-meaning votes, many minority parents here saw: a gambit to tear down a historic black school, the firing of 94 black aides to make room for the 34 likely white teachers, and, in the new International Baccalaureate program, another test for their kids to fail.

The clash in Greensboro highlights an emerging reality in low-income neighborhoods across the country: Tired of watching their kids struggle to learn under the academic policy du jour, minority parents across the US are demanding that school districts listen to their ideas of how best to educate their children.

And their answers, which frequently include a desire to put minority children in all-black or Latino schools or make sure they have a teacher of the same color, are dismaying some educators. They are afraid a generation of diversity policies may be undone by the very people those policies were created to help.

"We're seeing more and more minority parents stand up and get involved on a more systematic level," says Judith Brown, an education attorney with the Advanced Project in Washington, an educational advocacy group affiliated with the NAACP. "It's a phenomenon that's percolating across the country."

Organizing in pews and community centers from the steep streets of San Francisco to muggy Drew, Miss., these new parent activists are having more success than many of them ever imagined.

On Saturday in Denver, hundreds of black and Latino parents on the city's vast north side cheered at the opening of a dual-language Montessori school designed not by administrators, but by parents.

In Drew, Miss., parents are engaging the school board over "zero tolerance" policies that set out to make schools safer - but which parents say have resulted in a disproportionate number of black students being kicked out of the classroom.

And yesterday morning in San Francisco, Edison Elementary opened for the first day of school, thanks to parent protests. At least one mother, Linda Gausman, planned to walk the halls after dropping off her fourth-grader to savor the victory. This summer, Ms. Gausman and more than 100 other mostly minority parents waved placards on the streets and lobbied the state school board to override a decision by a local school district to close the popular school. "We had no choice but to win - for our kids," says Ms. Gausman.

With not enough time to develop a boycott, a peaceful protest began here Monday in Greensboro's elementary, middle, and high schools. Forty-one years after black youths convinced shops to end lunch-counter segregation in this city, hundreds of parents were expected to stroll into local schools as part of an organized civil action to bring attention to the plight of their children.

Even before protests began yesterday, the school board made concessions to the at-times volatile crowds that have packed recent board meetings.

The board promised parents they'd hire a restoration consultant to study options other than tearing down the visibly deteriorated school.

Page: 1 | 2