27 December 2011, 4:50 am
Louisiana has like many states in the so called south distinct racial lines and sometimes poverty lines. There are a few cases brought on by the NAACP. Some folks felt like they were being segregated against. Some may have been. There were two schools in Tangipahoa Parish. Kenner was a predominantly black school (system). The school was in a 80-90 % black nieghborhood. So if a neighborhood is suppose to represent its surroundings then the school should be 80-90 %. Loranger was a mostly white neighborhood of middle to upper class with some lower class (income based) folks. Yet there was a plan to force white kids to move from a majority white area and school to a predominantly black school and send some black kids to the white school to EQUALIZE the student racial ratio. Yet, when the parents of these kids learned this they withdrew their kid from the school system and either sent them to private academies or homeschooled costing the school system to lose millions in revenue. "If this was all about desegregating schools, it didn't work," said Stephen Caldas, a desegregation expert at Hofstra University in New York who formerly taught at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. "The consequences were pretty much the opposite of what we want: The middle class left, took all of their social capital and financial capital, and moved to the middle-class parishes that surround them." East Baton Rouge Parish schools were released from federal court supervision a few weeks ago in a case that dated back to 1956. But many critics have said the long federal case there strayed from its intended goal. During the intervening 51 years, a federal judge recused himself, and two parish towns, Zachary and Baker, formed their own school districts in protest. Schools fell into disrepair; no new school taxes were passed for nearly three decades, from the late '60s until 1998. Former Superintendent Gary Mathews, who ran the district from 1995 through 2001, publicly said conditions in the schools were "comparable to that of some Third World countries." Up until 1981, little was done to integrate the schools, so a federal judge stepped in with a sweeping plan to bus students and combine many schools. The decision caused white families, who at the time made up 60 percent of the student population, to largely abandon the system. Since the late 1970s, the number of white students declined from nearly 42,000 to fewer than 8,000, and private school enrollment has surged. Black students make up nearly 80 percent of the district's population. "The very children for whom the desegregation order was intended turned out to be those who were harmed the most by the atrocious forced-busing plan that was in place," said Mathews, who now works as a superintendent in Williamsburg, Va. "My view is the courts had the right motive, but they were employing the wrong means." so why exactly should the school system be enforcing this kind of integration... Read More »
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