From the annals of "Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Any Worse..."
One of the greatest costs of Hurricane Katrina has been in human terms. We've all seen the footage, the photos, the horror of it all. Now some 372,000 school-age kids from New Orleans and elsewhere have been displaced, and many of them are settling in Texas (assuming that the state survives Rita, too-God help them all). The question: where will they go to school? The answer, as supplied by US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), IS TO SEGREGATE THEM. I kid you not. Read on if you want to know how Brown vs. Board of Education is being circumvented in the Lone Star State...
You see, Brown vs. Board of Education (the landmark 1954 ban on segregation by the Warren Court) did not clearly state that schoolchildren could be integrated with the possibility of their being homeless. The McKinney-Vento Act of 1987 (fully enacted by 2001) fixed that problem by allowing homeless students (such as those affected by natural disasters such as Katrina) to be integrated into the various schools of their new settlements. The idea is simple; it may be a slight incovenience at first for the school, but soon enough the new students will settle in to their community, and the school will be better for it in the long run. In a state of over 20 million citizens, adding some 150,000 children to the school systems (assuming many move past Texas to settle elsewhere) would consist of spreading families out and making their children welcomed in different schools throughout the Lone Star State.
What, then, is the plan to deal with Katrina's student victims? The answer: segregate them! The Wall Street Journal on September 14th ran the following article:
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'The 372,000 schoolchildren displaced by Hurricane Katrina are stirring an old debate about whether separate education can really be equal. A number of states, including Utah and Texas, want to teach some of the dispersed Gulf Coast students in shelters instead of in local public schools, a stance supported by the Bush administration and some private education providers. But advocates for homeless families and civil rights oppose that approach.
At the center of the dispute is whether the McKinney-Vento Act, a landmark federal law banning educational segregation of homeless children, should apply to the evacuees. In addition, because many of the stranded students are black, holding classes for them at military bases, convention centers or other emergency housing sites could run afoul of racial desegregation plans still operating in some school districts.
Separate education for the evacuees is "unconscionable," says Barbara Duffield, policy director for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. "Many states have worked extremely hard to comply with the law and give these kids a regular school experience. The federal Department of Education is seeking to undermine the law at a time when it is most needed."
Businesses from charter schools to distance-education providers are already pressing for permission to teach the homeless in shelters and other makeshift housing, hoping to gain broader acceptance for their approaches to education. Mark Thimmig, chief executive of White Hat Ventures LLC, which educates nearly 5,000 students in Pennsylvania and Ohio via the Internet, said last week that his company would be eager to educate displaced students in the Astrodome...'
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THE ASTRODOME?! HELLO!!!! THESE ARE AMERICAN STUDENTS IN THE 21ST CENTURY,
NOT IN THE JIM CROW ERA!
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The article continues:
'Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley, noting that 25,000 evacuees are housed at a closed Air Force base in San Antonio, asked the federal Education Department last week for "flexibility" to serve students "at facilities where they are housed, or otherwise separate from Texas residents during the 2005-2006 school year." U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, introduced legislation Monday that would grant Secretary Spellings authority to waive McKinney-Vento.
Such proposals are arousing consternation among advocates for the homeless, who fear that nearly two decades of gains in public-school enrollment for homeless children will be wiped out. They note that the act, which also requires school systems to enroll homeless children even without documentation such as health and residency records and to employ liaisons to the homeless, was vital to the swift, open-armed response of school districts to the student influx in the hurricane's aftermath.
Also, they say, thousands of storm-battered children have already enrolled in public schools across the country without ill effects. Gary Orfield, director of a Harvard University project that monitors school integration, said that segregating a predominantly black group of evacuees could raise "constitutional questions of racial discrimination." He also said that because many of them may be traumatized, have learning deficits, or come from failing schools, it would be "terrifically difficult" to teach a separate class of the displaced students, and that placing them in middle-class schools and communities would benefit them educationally.
William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizen's Commission on Civil Rights, said the administration's plans to ease McKinney-Vento and No Child Left Behind could leave the displaced students warehoused and forgotten.
"We need some focus on the needs of the children, and not go around waiving a lot of regulations without deciding whether there's a need," Mr. Taylor said.
Not all states are seeking waivers. Mississippi officials turned down a proposal from a Navy base to hold classes there. Nikisha Ware, a Mississippi Department of Education official, said the law had helped evacuees to enroll in
schools without red tape. "If there were no McKinney-Vento," she said, the hurricane "would have created it." '
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I'm speechless, really. To think that in modern America that such actions could even be thought of, let alone take place is absolutely reprehensible. Let me repeat a quote from the article: "Gary Orfield, director of a Harvard University project that monitors school integration, said that SEGREGATING A PREDOMINATELY BLACK GROUP OF EVACUEES COULD RAISE "CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS OF RACIAL DESCRIMINATION."
This is 2005, folks. People fought and even died in the Civil Rights Movement to end this sort of practice. And why now? I am hesistant to call anyone racist, but this plan smacks of racism, and it MUST BE STOPPED. Call your US Senators and Representatives, and ask them where they stand on the McKinney-Vento Bill. There is too much at stake to stand idly by.
Oh, and if you want to get rid of Kay Bailey Hutchison for this kind of shenanigan, Barbara Radnofsky's doing just that. Check her out-she'd be a welcome change, to say the least. It's at http://www.radnofsky.com
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UPDATE: A new article from Salon.com, which shows that Senate Dems aren't taking this lying down. It also talks about the "motivations" for the repeal, as well as spin from KBH:
Separate schools for Katrina students?
Texas officials want to waive federal rules that prevent schools from segregating homeless students. But advocates and others are crying foul.
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By Michael
Scherer
Sept. 19, 2005 It started with a can of Sprite. Last week, a local student at Jesse H. Jones High School in Houston threw his soft drink at some of the new kids, those recently enrolled
teenagers who had fled Hurricane Katrina. The students from New Orleans fought back, sparking a schoolyard brawl that sent three students to the hospital for facial and rib injuries. By the time the dust-up cleared, police had arrested
five students, three from Houston and two from New Orleans.
The fight was the exception, not the rule. Over the past two weeks, Texas education officials have enrolled more than 40,000 displaced students, almost all of them from the New Orleans region. New teachers have been hired, new textbooks ordered and entire school buildings taken out of mothballs. Like other states, Texas has integrated the Katrina victims into its schools, following strict federal
guidelines that bar local school districts from educating homeless students separately from the general population or stigmatizing them with special identification cards or wristbands.
But on Capitol Hill, the Jones High School fight has been used to justify an effort by the
Department of Education and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, to waive those federal rules. The sheer number of evacuated students needing new schools, say advocates of the change, has turned the federal homeless statute into little more than burdensome red tape. On Monday, Sen. Hutchison introduced a bill with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, to allow school districts across the country to open separate schools for hurricane victims. The bill would take away the ability of evacuating parents to protest their children's placement in particular schools. It would also allow schools to issue "identification cards or other identifying insignia" for students affected by Hurricane Katrina. "Our top priority is keeping the kids from Louisiana in an environment that is safe, secure and familiar," said Chris Paulitz, a spokesman for Hutchison, who argues that in some cases evacuees might be better served by going to schools with other evacuees. "This is only a temporary waiver for the remainder of the school year."
But advocates for the homeless fear the waiver
would relegate evacuated students to second-class status. "It basically allows schools to discriminate pretty broadly against kids who are homeless as a result of the storm," says Barbara Duffield, an advocate for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. The waiver would suspend parents' right to protest their children's placement, while making it easier for students to be moved during the school year or denied transportation, Duffield said. She calls the prospects of Katrina-specific school identifications "absolutely horrifying." "It's like a scarlet letter K or something," she says.
Others in the Senate have already announced their intention to fight the proposal. "We shouldn't be segregating children who have just gone through such a traumatic experience," said Alex Glass, a spokeswoman for Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who sits on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Calls to waive the federal rules protecting homeless students began shortly after the evacuation of New Orleans. On Sept. 8, the top
educator in Texas, Shirley J. Neeley, wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Education asking for some legal "flexibility" in applying the McKinney-Vento Act, a law that requires equal treatment for homeless students. Among the
concerns, wrote Neeley, was the broad powers the law gave parents of homeless students to choose their children's school. "It is not practical to permit parents or guardians to select the campus a child will attend," Neeley wrote.
At around the same time, Utah officials sought permission to begin educating about 90 evacuated students at Camp Williams, a National Guard base
south of Salt Lake City. "We needed to keep those children as close to their parents as possible," said Pamela Atkinson, a community advocate who was asked by Utah's governor to help coordinate the program. The program is now winding down, she added, since there are only 20 students left on the base. "We said right from the beginning that Camp Williams was only temporary."
After researching the law, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings decided that she did not have the power to waive the requirements
herself. She has asked Congress to grant her new authority to help place the 372,000 students from Mississippi and Louisiana that the department estimates have been displaced by the storm. "The point is to get these kids into some kind of normalcy across the board," said Chad Colby, a spokesman for Spellings, who added that Mississippi has also requested waivers. "In a unique situation like this, which McKinney-Vento was not written to address, the secretary thinks she needs the authority."
The Hutchison bill goes further by specifically allowing exemptions to the portions of McKinney-Vento that prohibit school officials from doing anything that would "stigmatize" homeless students, like issuing identification badges. The provision is targeted at younger students, said Paulitz, Sen. Hutchison's spokesman. "It would be an easy way for teachers and bus drivers to be able to bring them back to a specific shelter," he said, adding that he knows of no schools in Texas that have begun issuing badges or wristbands to homeless schoolchildren.
There are definitely no badges in Houston, where officials say they have been working to make evacuated students feel as comfortable as possible. But the district will face a problem if Congress does not approve a waiver. The district has opened up two elementary schools, Douglass and Ryan Elementary, simply to handle the evacuee overflow. Under the current law, a temporary school just for homeless students is allowed in response to an emergency. But unless Congress acts, they will eventually have to be integrated with local students.
Houston school board member Arthur Gaines says he does not expect the integration to be
a problem. "They are our students," Gaines said of the 4,000 young evacuees who have arrived in the district in recent weeks. The recent fight at Jones High School was just an aberration. "It was an incident," he said. "I am quick to
want to isolate it."