I recently built a standing desk after realizing nothing I was doing diet wise was helping me lose weight. Two coworkers came into my office an hour after it was set up to check it out, and we had the following conversation.

Coworker 1: Look at this uppity first year building a desk over the weekend when you’ve been talking about it forever.
Coworker 2: I know, I’ve been talking about it for years, and you just go and make one.
Me: It’s a good thing I’m not black with your use of the word uppity.
Them: Huh?
Me: It’s a racially charged word, like articulate.
Coworker 1: I’ve been called uppity before, I don’t think it’s racist…
Coworker 2: How is “articulate” racist?
Me: I suppose it’s because it’s expressing such a surprise that a black man could speak so well that one needs to comment on it.

To be clear, at no point did I think my coworkers were being offensive; my point of discussing the word uppity was to note how important audience is to an otherwise dismissive remark. But what I came out realizing was that this was why dog-whistle politics remain so effective: there is a mass of people who don’t hear the hidden subtext.

“Uppity” and “Articulate”

Both these words carry a racial connotation stemming from a racist background. While uppity was “a term racist southerners used for black people who didn’t know their place,” articulate was historically “meant to signal the exceptional Negro.” In other words, while uppity was reserved for blacks who only considered themselves exceptional, articulate was for those who were deemed so by whites.

If you find yourself in disagreement, perhaps there’s a generational component. After asking several (7, because how much more scientific could it get?) of my friends and colleagues (mid 20’s to mid 30’s) whether they felt the words were racially charged, nearly all of them answered that the words were neutral. When I asked an older coworker, he exclaimed, “Of course those words are racist! Hardly anyone ever uses uppity outside of that context. No one under the age of 40 can deny that.”

Although it isn’t like the word suddenly fell out of favor in the 80’s. Just recently, in 2008, a Republican Congressman Lynn Westmoreland said that the Obamas were part of an elitist, “uppity” class. When asked to elaborate, his press secretary pointed out that the word was an adjective for elitism, not a racially tinged remark. Westmoreland’s press secretary supposedly emailed him the dictionary definition so he could be sure that he was using the word correctly: 1. affecting an attitude of inflated self-esteem; snobbish. 2. rebelliously self-assertive; not inclined to be deferential.

Two years ago, Rush Limbaugh doubled down, explaining that the boos Michelle Obama and Jill Biden received at a Nascar event were for Michelle’s uppity-ism in taking a different jet than her husband.

As noted above, some people rush to the dictionary to show that the word has no racial tinge. The problem is that dictionaries offer denotations (explicit meanings), not connotations (implicit meanings). Either way, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is quite helpful. Here’s a direct quote in the OED from 1952.

F. L. ALLEN Big Change II. viii. 130 The effect of the automobile revolution was especially noticeable in the South, where one began to hear whites complaining about ‘uppity n******’ on the highways, where there was no Jim Crow.

So why is uppity racist? Although the dictionary definition only reveals hints of arrogance, the racial tinge comes from how the word was historically used by whites. Quite often, the reserved epithet was “uppity Negro.” A black man or woman who had the nerve to demand equality would be branded uppity as equality was above their station in life. Take a note on how it’s used even today. Glenn Beck, the controversial radio personality, defended Rush Limbaugh’s use of the word uppity, saying, “Uppity? You don’t think she’s a little snotty? Really? Really? Miss Arugula? Come on!” If the same insult wouldn’t work on Mrs. Reagan or Mrs. Bush, perhaps it’s because it’s presumed arugula and fancy steak dinners fit within their stations of life.

As for articulate, when whites use it to describe blacks, there is a hidden subtext of surprise and amazement. It means the person speaks well … “for a black person.” What may be praise for the individual comes off as an insult to the group. Think of the praise bestowed on women leaders as “calculating” or “tough.” A male acting identically would not merit the praise; instead, the comment stems from a comparison to a stereotype of women.

Dog Whistle Politics

Those two examples are not isolated incidents. Instead, they’re an example of dog-whistle politics, where political figures use supposedly neutral terms with hidden meanings. One part of the electorate is oblivious, while the other gets whipped into a frenzy. While both parties have their own versions (see Democrats’ use of “women’s health issues” to signal abortion and reproduction issues), it seems Republicans have the monopoly on race-related ones.

Lee Atwater, the former Republican Party strategist, probably explained it best in 1981 with the GOP Southern Strategy.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968, you can’t say “n*****” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”

One of the biggest dangers of dog-whistles are that they allow for plausible deniability (“Uhh, I didn’t mean that in a racist way!”) while then allowing for speakers to farm out white resentment when their statements are called out as racist (“PC has gotten out of control!”). On top of that, they rally people unable to hear the dog whistle to their cause to argue that the whistle doesn’t even exist (“No, he didn’t mean that, and you’re doing a disservice to genuine racism by raising false alarms!”).

So the next time someone calls out a statement as offensive, step back and pause. Maybe you simply can’t hear the dog whistle.

-fotografhia

a

aaa

Short version:  Yesterday, two 14-year-old kids from Frost Middle were charged with setting paper on fire during their insufferable bus ride.

Nobody was hurt. The bus didn’t catch on fire. The kids live somewhere around 36th and West Muhammad Ali Blvd, close to Western Middle School.  Close to Western Middle School.  Close to Western Middle School.

Did I mention that the kids live near Western Middle School?

And why should these children spend 21 days of their lives on a school bus to attend the crummiest middle school in the state?  See below!  (school year = 180 days; middle school = 6th, 7th, 8th grades)

a

Remember the show “All in the Family”? That was our house – my Pop was a younger version of Archie Bunker. He also had a ridiculous chair that no one else was permitted to sit in.

Pops Chair was almost this ugly.

When first I started school I remember picking up that he did not care for me to have friends who looked different from me. My very first school friend was a girl named Frances who was from Mexico and spoke no English. We communicated by drawing pictures and walked home from school together every day. She lived on the next block over. Pops made it clear that she was not welcome at our house and that he was glad to live on a block completely composed of people who were white like us. I remember thinking that if he got to know Frances that he would like her so much that he would love for her to live next door! It made me feel a little sick inside to know that he did not feel the same way. Mostly I felt sad for Pop – Frances was a wonderful person and he would never know that.

This was about as much diversity as Pops was willing to tolerate in the 1960′s

In 4th grade – about 1970-71 – I was asked to write a report on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I went to the encyclopedia to look him up and he wasn’t listed anywhere. Our Britannica set was from 1948, so that was understandable. I asked Pop about him – and he was not happy to discuss the subject. He spit our a string of epithets and curses in regards to Dr. King, it angered him that I would even be asked to write about King. He told me a crazy conspiracy story about a n****r who planned to fake his own death and come back from the dead on Easter. The plan went wrong and now he was a martyr. I knew I would get nothing useful from Pop.

I vaguely recall listening to him talking to a pollster on the phone about who he was planning to vote for in a presidential race – I cannot recall the year. I only recall him saying that he had no idea, now that someone had shot his choice – I have always hoped he was talking about Bobby Kennedy and not George Wallace, but to be honest I’d bet it was Wallace that inspired that reaction out of him.

In 1972 forced busing was instituted in Las Vegas to finally fully integrate public schools. Schools in African-American neighborhoods were converted to “Sixth Grade Centers” and the students in that neighborhood would be bused every year except sixth grade. White kids were only bused in sixth grade. Some committee somewhere thought this hair-brained arrangement was equitable.

This was Boston – but it happened in Las Vegas too.

My Pop was not on board with the idea either, but for other reasons. He could hide his Archie Bunker-ian tendencies by saying that busing made no sense – we lived three blocks away from a perfectly fine elementary school. Behind closed doors his language was somewhat more colorful. His solution to the problem of having his kids bused to “N-town” was to place us into a Christian school for the duration of the year that we would be bused. The irony of this was totally lost on Pops. He also declared about this time that if any black family (my words, not his) moved onto Isabelle Avenue, that the neighborhood would be ruined, unsafe, and that we would have to move.

That day finally came in the mid 80’s, long after Archie Bunker was consigned to syndication. The house across the street was purchased by a family of four relocating from Zaire. Isabelle Avenue was to be their very first address in the United States. They were totally unfamiliar with American culture, American cuisine, and American lawn maintenance. They cut down the shady elms in the front and back yards and built a huge fire pit off the back patio. The did not cut their front lawn at all – in fact they seemed to revel in it’s lush depth. I’m not talking about grass four or five inches deep, I’m talking about grass grown tall like wheat ready to harvest. It came up over their knees and was waist deep in places. The back yard did not require any mowing or harvesting because they brought in a young goat and kept it back there.

Grass this tall was too deep for Isabelle Avenue

Lawn maintenance aside, they were a lovely family. Each Sunday they wore bright white clothing to church. Mom, Dad, son, and daughter looked like something out of another time as they walked to the car. They all were very polite, uncommonly so. The young boy wandered over to our yard one day when mom was picking the strawberries out of her garden. He was completely fascinated by their bright color. Mom picked a basketful and sent them home with him. Anyone who talked gardening was a friend to mom.

At Easter time they butchered the goat and roasted it in the pit in the back yard. They walked across the street to invite Mom and Pops, but they politely declined. Pops could talk a big game, but when it came down to it he could not be rude to someone face-to-face when he was sober. As summer started it became clear to the family that letting the lawn grow like a crop was not the accepted method of landscaping in their new neighborhood and the dad came across the street and knocked on our door. Pops answered and the gentleman asked, “Mr. Carter, could we kindly borrow your grass cutting machine?” Pops replied, “No.” The neighbor said, “But we need to cut the grass, it is far too long.” Pops responded, “No, you can’t use the mower because it is too tall, it will bog down the blades.” The man left and returned to his house with a puzzled look.

Pops came out of the backyard and headed across the street with the weed-eater and showed his neighbor how to use it to shorten the lawn enough to mow it. Together they weed-eated, mowed, edged, and watered the lawn. It was a thing of beauty to see the neighborhood finally fully integrated.

They lived on Isabelle Avenue for many years. They were so very kind to Pops when mom died. In the early part of this century housing values went through the roof. Houses that sold originally for twenty or thirty thousand were selling for ten times that. The family from Zaire cashed out and moved on. Pops stayed put even though I urged him to think about selling and buying some thing closer to me. Those worries about integration taking down housing values seem pretty silly now. I think America is a great country and love the idea that the first black family on the block made a killing in real estate!

In 2008, Nevada changed its presidential primary to the caucus format. My pop and his wife volunteered to be delegates to the state convention. Initially they had supported Hillary Clinton (Democrat or not this shocked me – that Archie Bunker could support even the idea of a female president) but as delegates they were obligated to cast their votes for the candidates that won from their local caucus. They were Obama delegates. Not only did they cast their delegate votes for Obama, they started volunteering for his campaign. This was the first time my Pop had ever participated in the process beyond casting a vote or accepting a yard sign. The man who wouldn’t permit me to attend a school in a black neighborhood was now supporting the man who would become our first black president!

Maybe there is hope after all – people really can change.

I recall during that election that Pop spoke so excitedly about Obama and even mentioned the monumentality of electing a black president. He seemed proud of his country as he watched it come to pass. It was like I was listening to a different man.

I can’t say how this change happened, it probably was a process. I’m sure that time had a lot to do with it, but I also think a sweet family with an overgrown yard might just have been a catalyst for change.

Reference

Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972, 20 U.S.C. sections 1681 – 1688 (1972).

If you and your daddy have successfully cashed in on the infirm, the elderly and the institutionalized coupled with the income-preserving double-whammy of denying treatment to all of the above, you probably have no compunction with cashing in on children and public education in some pretty creative ways.

Of course, I’m talking about district 2 school board candidate David Jones, Jr., unloading a much un-needed product called HealthTeacher on our local school district as well as eleven of the largest school districts in the nation.  And there’s  StraighterLine, a shortcut to get college credit hours,  which somehow wormed its way into the local community college after Jones’ “civic involvement” with 55,000 Degrees.  ”What’s next,” one reader asked,  ”sock puppets?

Nothing will surprise me.

For now, let’s drop the talk about Jones pimping tech products and cashing in on our failing schools through his company, Chrysalis Ventures.  All of that crap is chump change compared to what I’m about to tell you.

Let’s talk about real estate.  Lots of it.  Hundreds and hundreds of acres of it in Oldham County.  Land of high-performing, neighborhood schools – which is the key selling point in every Oldham County real estate listing.  Oldham County is no different from any other school district in the nation – buy a house and send your kids to school down the road.  Unlike JCPS, this school district won’t pull any surprises and put your kid on the bus for two or three hours  a day.

Summary:  Oldham County’s sole competitive advantage over Jefferson County is neighborhood schools.

What happens if neighborhood schools return to Louisville?  Well, thousands of lots in Oldham County will just sit there collecting dust and tax payments for the developers that are stuck with them. When forced busing ends in Louisville, you’ll buy a house in Lake Forest - 41 homes available right now! – , Owl Creek, Prospect, Hunting Creek or Norton Commons  and know exactly where your child will attend school.  It’s a concept that’s so simple to the rest of the nation but has vexed our school board for decades.  Why?

Oldham County is nice but you have to admit that filling up the Suburban for $130 is hard on the wallet and that commute really, really stinks.  Well-heeled parents will gladly pass up Oldham County when Louisville ends forced busing.  I know it, you know it, David Jones, Jr., his daddy and all of his realtor/developer friends know it.

Remember The Perfect Business Plan I told you about in a previous post?  Buy a few hundred acres in Oldham County, unload a chunk of land on the school district for a new school,  sell the surrounding developed land and watch your return on investment soar.

Ouch!  The Perfect Business Plan completely collapsed when Oldham County’s school board said, “No, thanks” to the offer of free land.  My super-awesome, venture capital friend in Oldham County told me how the developers of Brentwood, a 345-lot development, supposedly tried to unload a parcel of land on Oldham County’s school district for an elementary school. The school district didn’t want the land since growth was slowing down.  (This info is in a previous post, by the way.)

According to Oldham Ahead, here’s what happened with housing starts in Oldham County…

And here’s what enrollment numbers look like in Oldham County:

Oh, dear.   No school/anchor for Brentwood’s 345-lot subdivision.  Things got worse when residents near the development lawyered up and sued the developer, Oldham Farms Development…  remember that name!  These people are tied to Jones, Sr., (see below).  Anyway, they plowed ahead and put in sewers and gas lines, kind of like Jones, Jr., stays in the school board race even though he’s cashing in on Chrysalis and Humana cashing in on JCPS.  Yes, I said it.

This is an ancient story from Julie Tam on wdrb.com and the bold is mine:

A developer has broken ground on a new subdivision in Oldham County, despite a court battle involving residents of two neighboring subdivisions.

Residents of Spring Hill and Briar Hill subdivisions say they like the peace and quiet of little traffic going through their neighborhoods. An undeveloped field between them provides a buffer. But the open land is slowly turning into a new subdivision — Brentwood. Oldham Farms Development has begun clearing land to make way for more than 300 homes and an elementary school.

“For four times, we were successful in convincing the planning & zoning committee that this kind of density is not good for planning in Oldham County,” Jennifer Milton-Houlton, a resident of Briar Hill, said.

This is where I need to inform you that you can’t swing a dead cat in Oldham County without hitting a member of the Clore family.  With that said, take a look at this information about Oldham Farms Development from the Kentucky Secretary of State website which you may have seen in a previous post:

aaa

Take a look at Oldham Farms Development’s address.  And take a look at the address for Main Street Realty, the folks that are trying to unload Brentwood property sans elementary school anchor:

aaa

There’s district 2 school board candidate David Jones, Jr.’s daddy on the board of directors for Main Street Realty.  You may have seen this screenshot in an earlier post, too, but I’m always happy to remind you of nifty details.

There are about 345 lots in Brentwood going for about $77,000 each.  Fire up your calculators – that’s about $25,565,000 in potential sales.

Just visit the Oldham County PVA to take a look at the epic list of lots that Oldham Farms Development is hoping to unload with Main Street Realty’s help.

Oldham Farms Development has plenty of  land sitting around.
aaa

aaa

Oldham Farms Develelopment and Main Street Realty aren’t the only groups tied to The Perfect Business Plan.  There’s that whole story of Brownsboro School Campus, a little real estate deal that earned the scrutiny of Crit Luallen.  Long story, we’ll discuss later.  Another Clore is tied to the Brownsboro School deal.  The school district purchased about 95 acres for a steal, about $27,500/acre, and planned to build an elementary, middle and high school on the property.  Let’s just lowball the land available for development near the Brownsboro School Campus at 250 acres, though it’s probably much more.  Let’s use the recipe for Brentwood: $77,000 per 0.4 acre lot with 250 acres available = $48,125,000 in potential revenue.

This is from a fun letter from the Oldham County superintendent:

After learning that the Oldham County Nursery property in Brownsboro was again available, I consulted with a local realtor/developer who offered to negotiate the best price he could for the property with no risk or obligation on the part of the district.  As a result of his efforts, the Board of Education was able to save about $500,000 on the purchase of the property.  The realtor/developer received no commission from the Board of Education for his assistance in negotiating a favorable purchase price of $27,500 per acre.

Word is that The Jones Group was in on that deal.  And the realtor/developer was cozy with a member on the Oldham County school board and got in some trouble with Crit Luallen.

Here’s some info about The Jones Group (there’s another Clore in the mix!) and you can click on the pic to visit their website:

These folks would love to sell you some land in Summerfield! There are, after all, about 500 acres up for sale at $99,000 for 0.6 acres.  Final calculation for potential revenue: $82,500,000.

I know.  The zeroes are piling up on your screen so quickly that you need a Cray supercomputer to keep up with all of them.

The grand total for the three developments that are tied to Jones, Sr., and various Clores has already topped $156,190,000.  I haven’t even bothered to dig very hard – I can’t imagine what I will find if I put a good hour into this.  I have a cold and my sinuses are about to explode so let’s wrap up this post.

Will David Jones, Jr., fight neighborhood schools in Louisville to preserve the financial interests of realtors and developers who have connections to his daddy and his daddy’s friends?

Oh, I’m pretty sure you know the answers to those questions.

If this guy wins a seat on the school board, I’m going to have so much to blog about for four years!

*

*

*

Margaret would take a packed bus through her neighborhood of Dorchester and arrive at school where she would begin her day. But, because of racial tension Margaret was often bullied mentally and psychically. Her mother often got into arguments with the city and opted to let Margaret stay home from school so she would not be involved in the mass hysteria. When she did go to school, the bus she was on would be pelted by rocks. Walking into school would take a lot longer than necessary, people in the community who were against busing would yell out racial slurs while she was walking into the school, and the children she attended school with would make her feel very isolated. The forced busing continued for years, but Margaret continued to focus on school and overcame all the racial conflict she was faced with.

Forced busying is a very historical and monumental time period in terms of desegregation throughout the country. Margaret Grant experienced it firsthand but was able to finish middle school, and continue through high school to graduate. She never let the extreme racism she experienced change her view on life. To this day, she sees everyone equally and is able to teach her children the same views she maintained throughout the entire forced busing.

Well, your choice can be summed up with two people named Jones.

The first is named Lexi.

She wakes up around 6 a.m. and heads to her bus stop in the dark.  She begins every day with what your GPS would call a 40-minute trip — if there’s no traffic.  But there’s always traffic and plenty of bus stops.  Let’s be conservative and say she spends fifty minutes on her journey from one end of the county to another — commutes like Lexi’s sent local bridge-hopping professionals into a major tizzy when the Sherman Minton Bridge was shut down.

Lexi does it every day. Both ways.

And she doesn’t have a choice in the matter because  JCPS makes her do it.

What is Lexi’s destination? It’s the worst middle school in the state of Kentucky, which makes it the worst middle school in Louisville — Frost Middle School.  Frost ranks 315th out of 315 Kentucky middle schools.  So, you know what that means. If her mother wants her in a better school, she just has to get her into ANY other school.

Two weeks ago, a red Mustang  slammed into her bus at Moorman and Lower River Road on a rainy morning.  The bus toppled over and skidded on its side. Lexi told local news stations she thought she was going to die.

Get this.  It wasn’t her first JCPS bus wreck.

There is not a single benefit to Lexi being bused to the worst middle school in the city. Not one. In fact, some harm is done. Her time is wasted.  Time that could be spent getting some extra sleep in the morning, time that could be spent with her mom in the afternoons. Lexi’s time is invested in a bus ride, twice a day, every day.  You have to wonder if she’s been doing this since kindergarten.  Even if she hasn’t, she has spent an extraordinary amount of her middle school days on a school bus that’s headed to an academic wasteland.

Her mother, Cherisse Jones, can’t be involved in her education as much as she likes because the school is so far from home.  She told WDRB News: “If there are schools closer to where the children live, children should be able to go where they are. Just for things like this. This is the second wreck that my child has been in.”

The second Jones is named David, Jr.

He is the District 2 candidate for the school board. His father, is David Jones, Sr. Bloomberg called him the richest man in Louisville. When he stepped down as chairman of Humana in 2005, it was a $20 billion company.

Jones, Jr., says on his campaign website that he attended the “old Louisville public schools.”  He never mentions attending Jefferson County Public Schools.  That probably means Mr. Jones was never forcibly bused and never had to attend a school that included children who were forcibly bused.

Something  he doesn’t tell you on his website is that he attended Kentucky Country Day (tuition today, $18,000). In 1979, “under the direction of Headmaster John Gernert and the assistance of [Kentucky Country Day] board members Brown-Forman Distillery executive Owsley Brown Frazier and Humana President David Jones, Sr., a new school was built on today’s campus at the intersection of Springdale Road and Brownsboro Road.”

When Jones, Jr., was a student in the late 1970s, Humana was the largest for-profit hospital system in the United States.

I’m glad Mr. Jones had a dad who was so involved with his school.  And it’s especially nice that Jones, Jr., was able to attend the school of his choice.

Unlike Lexi, this Jones didn’t have to ride an hour on the bus.  He walked to school.  It says so right on his web site.  But these two Joneses do have one thing in common.  Neither one wanted to be on that long bus ride.  

So we know that David Jones, Jr., left the public schools for a private school.  He went to Yale, graduated from law school, did all the stuff you’d expect a son of wealth to do, and recently has been involved in some education support efforts.  Now, he wants to be on our school board.

He says a lot of fancy things about education. But everything he stands for comes down to this: David Jones, Jr., thinks Lexi Jones should be on that bus. It wasn’t what was best for him, son of a healthcare tycoon, but for Lexi Jones and thousands of other children in this city who can’t opt out of public schools or just attend their neighborhood schools, forced busing is a perfectly fine idea.  Because that’s what the JCPS student assignment plan really is, you know.  Forced busing.

This school board election poses one question — which Jones are you with? The rich guy wanting to pad his resume and his Chrysalis portfolio while putting children on long bus rides? Or are you with the middle school girl who has survived two bus wrecks whose mother has to travel all the way across the county to be involved in her child’s school?

Which Jones are you going to choose?

If West End kids were allowed to attend their neighborhood schools, two things would happen: 1) JCPS would have schools with a high percentage of black students and 2) that bus wreck at Lower River and Moorman wouldn’t have happened.  Unfortunately,  JCPS and Louisville’s civic leaders will do everything in their power to block the return to neighborhood schools so brace yourselves for more bus wrecks.

And if you truly believe forced busing has no effect on the number of bus wrecks, you have absolutely no understanding of probability.  Please move along to another, less challenging pit stop on the Internet.

District 1 school board member Diane Porter confidently stated in a recent post-crash interview that JCPS’ student assignment plan (forced busing) is not the reason for JCPS’ bus wrecks.

Six bus crashes in less than four weeks, Mrs. Porter.

It’s time to gong this lady off the stage.

The recent bus wreck at Lower River Road involved a JCPS school bus that was transporting children who were being forcibly bused from Louisville’s West End and Portland to Frost Middle School. Let’s take a quick look at their daily journey.

Here’s a screenshot from Google of directions from Rowan Street, a main drag in Portland to Frost Middle. The screenshot was taken at 9:30 p.m. – when the trip is estimated to take about 36-40 minutes.  Add about 10 minutes to the trip time for a morning commute:

A map of the kids’ journey is below.  Every morning,  they travel from the northwestern corner of Jefferson County, continue far beyond the Watterson Expressway, and end up at the southern edge of the county, beyond the Gene Snyder Freeway. At the end of their forty-minute bus ride, they end up at the worst middle school in the state of Kentucky, Frost Middle, which ranks 315th out of 315 Kentucky middle schools.

Does Diane Porter really believe District 1 parents placed Frost Middle as the first choice on their middle school application? If that’s what she thinks, she’s the only one. The kids on that wrecked bus were assigned to Frost Middle by JCPS; the parents did not pick that school. Even if you were nursing a heavy-duty hangover while watching the news coverage on the morning of the accident, you were able to figure out that there were plenty of parents who wanted to know why their kids were assigned to Frost instead of a school in their neighborhood. Don’t believe me? Just look at the post-crash videos on the local TV stations’ websites.

By the way, did you see any white kids or white parents on those interviews? I didn’t. Hang on to that thought.

Let’s talk about the kids who were in the Mustang that hit the school bus; they were westbound on Moorman, heading to Butler Traditional High School. Here’s a look at their morning commute:

And here’s a look at the Butler kids’ trip, which takes them from the southern edge of Louisville (again, outside the Gene Snyder!) to Shively, inside the Watterson Expressway.

Butler ranks 26th out of 227 Kentucky high schools. Not bad.

The black kids have a long commute by bus across town to the worst middle school in the state of Kentucky while the Butler kids, who are white, are cruising in the opposite direction to attend a respectably-ranked traditional high school. Forced busing for the black kids; “school choice” for the white kids. This sums up student assignment for JCPS – it’s an academic goody-bag of school choice for everyone who wants Manual or traditional programs but it’s forced busing for all of the kids who are just data points for one of Gary Orfield’s, feel-good diversity studies.

Now, who exactly is benefiting from forced busing? Fill me in when you have the chance, Mrs. Porter.

Now, let’s look at some demographics.

Frost Middle School is located in the 40272 zip code. Here’s the latest census data: 35,376 people reside in 40272; 32,609 are white and 1,487 are black. 92% of the population is white while 4.2% is black.

Through the magic of JCPS’ shady admissions program, which they swear is NOT race-based, Frost is -ta-da!- 50.3% black. Here’s some info from schooldigger.com:

If Frost’s neighborhood population is only 4% black, JCPS sure is busing a whole bunch of kids across town to crank up those black enrollment numbers.  They’ll tell you admissions are based on, um, uh, socioeconomic data, not on race.

Nobody believes that.

If busing was originally intended to give black students access to the schools of their choice, why aren’t they allowed to attend the neighborhood schools of their choice?

Well, it’s because they’re black.

JCPS says black schools are bad, white schools are bad.  And when you subscribe to that theory by putting a laser-like focus on busing, diversity, quotas and admissions schemes, your test scores are going to be really, really bad.

You know it’s true!

The Crapola-Journal will lob some softball questions to the school board candidates who support forced busing and regularly-occurring bus wrecks.  They’ll proceed to brand candidates who support neighborhood schools as a bunch of racists.  You can count on it.

Think about this… we had at least five bus wrecks in September.  The three worst accidents involved children who were being bused far from home.  Two of the accidents involved children who were being FORCIBLY bused to or from two of the lousiest schools in the entire state of Kentucky and – it gets even worse! – had to be transported to depots for their hours-long daily commute from one end of the county to the other.  School choice, my ass.

Just wait until I give you the grisly details about all of September’s bus wrecks.

Anyway.  Back to those interviews.

I know it’s hard to believe, but District 2 candidate David Jones, Jr., attended Kentucky Country Day and supports student assignment/forced busing.  Jones’ parents opted out of our public school system, did he do the same for his kids?  Will the C-J have the courage to blow his cover?  Here’s what KCD costs, in case you’re wondering:

aaa

District 7 candidate Chris Brady supports forced busing.  His children attend Farmer Elementary which is close to home but not their resides school.  Fun fact:  Farmer is not the highest-performing school in Mr. Brady’s cluster but it is the least racially-, least socioeconomically-diverse school from which he could choose.  Hmmm.

Surprise!  Both of those guys are endorsed by the rabid supporters of forced busing and diversity – the teachers’ union.  So much for living your convictions.

Here’s the interview schedule:

10a.m. Monday – District 2 candidates

2p.m. Monday –  District 4 candidates

1:30p.m. Tuesday – District 7 candidates

So, make sure you send your questions pronto to the white lady on the editorial board who doesn’t have any kids enrolled in JCPS – and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t ride TARC for a three-hour daily commute to and from Sixth and Broadway.  pplatt@courier-journal.com

It gets even better.  She stands by her comments because she was recording what she saw and heard.

Take that JCPS.

Let me just say this: JCPS has messed with the wrong parent this time.  This JCPS parent is extraordinarily upset about what happened and s/he is going to let everybody know about it.  I don’t blame this parent one bit.

Here’s what the parent has to say about the video and the bold is mine…

Here is what is being said and by whom:

OK so the man on the right holding the paper has on a JCPS ID badge. He is updating the two ladies on the status of 23 students. He is saying that most have been discharged but there are a few that their parents haven’t shown up yet or haven’t been contacted yet. He goes on to say in response to the female about it being a media circus and the need to get things under control. He says we will need some serious damage control to keeps things under control. He talks about keeping families from talking to the media.

The group of women to the right (not in the screenshot) are parents or family members and they are loudly talking about suing.  Before the video started rolling they were telling every parent who came out to call 1-800-GET-PAID.  My child and I both overheard these conversations. My child even went into the emergency room to get a candy bar and said it was complete chaos. Many parents still didn’t know what was going on… parents were furious. They were being told to go to the wrong hospital, no clear triage order, and basic chaos.

The bus driver was a sub. No media outlet, JCPS or LMPD has discussed this. I was told this from a bus driver out of Hoke Compound bus # ****.  Hope this helps!  I just hate the way JCPS is sugar coating everything and acting like it went smooth. They did not want parents or students talking to the media. I think they were concerned the busing issue would come up. This particular bus has already been altered once due to over crowding. This could have been so much worse. My child needed a [redacted] due to a [redacted] and the doctor said we would reschedule due to the chaos across the street (Southwest Hospital). The treatment would not have changed with or without the [redacted] but it was such a disorganized mess she felt it could wait.

I have more for you but I won’t overload you.  Yet.

According to WHAS.com, JCPS feels their response was “appropriate and swift.”

Let’s see.  Parents couldn’t find their children.  JCPS was worried about tarnishing its PR image.  A JCPS goon seemed more worried about managing the “media circus” instead of worrying about injured children and their worried parents.  Swift?  Sure.  Appropriate?  Ehh, not so much.  Click on the pic from whas.com to read the happy-happy-joy-joy version of the story.

According to his campaign website, he has two sons who attend Farmer Elementary.  Let’s look at how Mr. Brady incorporates “school choice” into his personal life, shall we?

Here we go…

Mr. Brady resides in Jeffersontown on Vintage Creek Drive. When you enter his address into the JCPS school finder, here’s what you get (you might need to click on the pic to read the teeny font):

If Jeffersontown Elementary is your resides school then you are in Cluster 4. Here are the schools in Cluster 4:

Farmer and Jeffersontown are the two elementary schools that are closest to Vintage Creek Drive – they’re both just a few miles from Vintage. At the end of this post, I’ll show you some interesting numbers about all of the schools in Cluster 4. For now, hang on.

Even though Indian Trail Elementary is in Cluster 4, take a look at what happens if you enter a J-town address into the bus finder. Just for fun, let’s enter Chris Brady’s address!

The smaller window states, “No bus stops found. Call Jeffersontown Compound.”

Well, look at that. If you live Chris Brady’s neighborhood, it looks like you aren’t getting bused to Indian Trail Elementary because they’re aren’t any buses to get you there. Maybe none of the folks in Brady’s neighborhood stepped up to the plate to get bused to Indian Trail, especially since it ranks 675 out of 704 elementary schools in Kentucky.

Gee, I wonder if anybody in Brady’s neighborhood is getting bused to Slaughter Elementary which ranks 701st out of 704 KY elementary schools? Let’s look at the Bus Finder info:

Shocking, isn’t it? Looks like nobody in Brady’s neighborhood is taking the commute across town to Slaughter, either.

Needless to say, a kid who lives near Indian Trail can hop on a JCPS bus to Farmer Elementary, no problem.  I don’t need to show you the Bus Finder info.  I will give you a snapshot of the commute a kindergartner takes to get there, though:

So, here’s the data for all of the schools in Brady’s cluster:

These are the most recent data from schooldigger.com.  Look at it.  Brady picked the least racially- and socioeconomically-diverse school in the entire cluster.  How about that?  He has the endorsement of the Jefferson County Teachers’ Association, which loudly supports diversity, diversity, diversity.   Looks like a little ideological conflict.  AGAIN.

Let me close with Mr. Brady’s comment to the Crapola-Journal on September 9, 2012, when he was asked about Louisville’s possible return to neighborhood schools:

Adopting a neighborhood school policy will remove school choice and could jeopardize successful programs such as our magnet and traditional programs.  Many of our suburban schools would instantly become overcrowded… This would have a negative effect on student achievement.

I have more to say.  I’ll save it for another post while you gather your thoughts.

My earliest experience as a Host family was when I was about 7. We went to an “Up With People” concert. Up With People was real popular in the 70′s. Started in 1965, Up with people  impacted communities through musical productions. The current Up with People program also addresses the very real need for young people from around the world to become global citizens, to develop an appreciation of diversity and cultures, and to learn the value of volunteerism as a way to make a positive impact on the world. We hosted 2 European guys for the weekend. I remember thinking that it was so cool that they performed on stage, and then came and stayed with us. It was like having 2 movie stars in our home!

In the summer time we had kids stay with us through a program in called Fresh Air Child . The program looked for volunteer host families to open up their homes for a few weeks each summer to inner city kids from Virginia to Maine. The program offers boys and girls, ages six to 18, free summer experiences in the country and the suburbs. The majority of Fresh Air children are from low-income communities. These are often families without the resources to send their children on summer vacations. Most inner-city youngsters grow up in towering apartment buildings without large, open outdoor play spaces. Concrete playgrounds cannot replace the freedom of running barefoot through the grass or riding bikes down country lanes. The children were about the same age as we were, so it was really fun having a summer guest stay with us. We looked forward to hosting a Fresh Air Child each summer.

The issue of desegregation of Connecticut’s schools became a legal one in 1975. The court ruled in favor of the state that school officials were not obligated to correct educational inequalities. This ruling lead to “forced busing” of inner city kids to better schools, and created many programs that offered better educational opportunities abroad. I’ll never forget the day that our student showed up at our front door. She had a very large afro with a pick in it, and she had just broken her leg so she was on crutches, and she loved basketball! She began her freshman year, and lived with our family for 3 years. We lost touch with her when we moved to Boston, but I was able to reconnect with her when I moved back to Connecticut after college almost 10 years later. Now almost 37 years later, she still keeps in touch with my Mom, and makes every effort to see her when she’s in town. She still considers my mother, her mother. She is thankful for the experience with my family, and we will never forget how she graciously impacted all our lives.

A Better Chance  has been opening the door to educational opportunities for thousands of young people of color in this nation since 1963. My mom began volunteering with this organization in 1980. Students participating in the program came from all over the country to attend our local high school. Although the students lived in a house with a chaperone, there were many opportunities for them to stay with a host family during school vacations and weekends. It was during my high school years that we hosted a few students. We all became very close. One of the students even stayed with us during the summer instead of going home. We all reconnected on Facebook 25 years later! One of the students still keeps in touch with my mother today.

My Mom was able to help many students apply for college, and obtain scholarships through the years. She continues to host international Exchange Students for college.

Thanks Mom for sharing your love with others. I have gained a much deeper appreciation for cultures, customs and habits different from my own. Best of all, we’ve made lifelong friends, brought people and cultures of the world closer together, and made the world a better place to live.

Thank you, Kentucky Supreme Court for guaranteeing that our youngest children will continue to have extraordinarily long bus rides.  Nice job.

When are we going to, at the very least, stop forcibly busing five year-olds all over the county?  We really need to end forced busing for elementary students and spend the transportation money on teachers’ assistants.

I know.  I’m a broken record.

On the very day the JCPS Van Hoose goons celebrated their victory to prevent children from attending their neighborhood schools, there was ANOTHER bus crash.  Just click on either one of the wreck pics to see the video from WLKY.

Guess who was on the bus?  Elementary school kids.

And it gets even better.

These were kids who switch buses at a depot.  It was 8:30 a.m. when the crash happened but the kids still had not reached the depot to board the buses to their final destinations.

My favorite part of the video is when JCPS’ Jim Engle says

All the kids were fine.  They’ve been taken to T.J. Middle and then there we’ve taken them to all the different schools.  They’re all depot – what I call – “depot children”.

All the different schools.  Depot children.  Ah, the convoluted JCPS vernacular.  Ya gotta love it.

Guess what else happened today? Some kid brought a gun to a JCPS school. Highland Middle was in a two-hour lock-down while police officers and police dogs scoured the school for a gun. A second gun. School officials found one unloaded gun but kids said there was a second one. Never found it.

The rumor is that some kid brought the guns(s) to school to sell it (them). Is this misbehavior enough to get expelled from JCPS? Uh, NO.

Gee, I wonder if the gun-toting student was a resides student (from the Highlands).  I’ll try to find out.

And I’m still wondering why nobody ever mentioned the loaded gun that was supposedly found at Waggoner High School.  The parents didn’t hear about it.  The news didn’t report it.  Nobody said peep.  Very strange!

Here’s the letter from Highland principal, Steve Heckman, who is a hell of a terrific principal, I’ve heard.

What a day!

JCPS adopted the plan to achieve its pedagogical goals under the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990. 1990 Ky. Acts ch. 476. Due to countywide geographic racial segregation, the school established the assignment plan to assure racial integration in schools that would otherwise be racially homogeneous if assignment was based solely on residence.  3. JCPS maintains that each school is equal because each receives equal funding, has equally qualified staff, and offers equivalent programs.Id. at 2.

As soon as Ted gets out of Court today and can read the opinion, he will decide what the best options are for this opinion:

aaa

1. Motion to reconsider the Kentucky Supreme Court

aaa

2. Check to see if any part of this opinion violates Meredith v JCPS of the SCOTUS, he can file in Federal Court

aaa

3. Find a segment of the population, preferably in the West End, that show that the socio-economic plan of JCPS student assignment plan is a proxy for race which would violate SCOTUS

This email may contain material that is confidential, privileged and/or a work product for the intended recipient. Any review, reliance or distribution without the express permission from HMG Media Relations is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and delete all copies.

            While we will always respect the decision by the majority of the justices at the Kentucky Supreme Court, we have to wonder at the obvious attempts by JCPS to influence this decision by JCPS’ ever-changing student assignment plans.

aaa

            With each new plan, JCPS has inched closer to neighborhood schools, which they realize that parents want and children need to improve the horrendous education that our children are now getting.

aaa

            All the parents in this case were courageous to take on the school system, and even though they did not win this round, they have made JCPS turn the corner, away from the out dated social experiment of busing.  Now these parents are hopeful that JCPS will start improving the education outcome for all our children.

This email may contain material that is confidential, privileged and/or a work product for the intended recipient. Any review, reliance or distribution without the express permission from HMG Media Relations is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and delete all copies.

2007:  SCOUTUS tells JCPS to stop using race as a factor in school admissions.

JCPS’ response?   Use race anyway!

Here are a couple of screenshots of JCPS’ student  assignment plan that flips the double bird to the Supreme Court; click on the pics to visit their website:

Summing up the decision from the Supreme Court is probably a snoozefest for most folks (not for me!) but try to slog through this from the Oyez Project at the Chicago-Kent School of Law (the bold is mine):

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the plurality opinion that ”The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Unlike the cases pertaining to higher education, Jefferson County’s plan involved no individualized consideration of students, and it employed a very limited notion of diversity (“black” and “other”). Jefferson County’s goal of preventing racial imbalance did not meet the Court’s standards for a constitutionally legitimate use of race: ”Racial balancing is not transformed from ‘patently unconstitutional’ to a compelling state interest simply by relabeling it ‘racial diversity.’”

The plans also lacked the narrow tailoring that is necessary for race-conscious programs. The Court held that Jefferson County’s enrollment plan was actually targeted toward demographic goals and not toward any demonstrable educational benefit from racial diversity. Jefferson County also failed to show that its objectives could not have been met with non-race-conscious means.

Still there?  JCPS received a serious paddling over admissions criteria that include demographic goals, which they are still using, and for lacking demonstrable educational benefits from racial diversity, which is still happening.   Since the SCOTUS decision, JCPS has rolled out a new and improved student assignment plan and ANOTHER ONE that will kick in next year for elementary schools.  Every plan incorporates race in the admissions criteria.  It’s on the JCPS website!

Here comes the data…

Here’s a shot of Fern Creek Elementary School’s 2006-07 School Report Card from the Kentucky Department of Education website.  41% of the students are African-American (156/380 =41%).  Their scores were 84% proficient/distinguished in reading and 65% prof/dist in math:

aaa

Four years after the SCOTUS decision, African-American enrollment was at 33.4% and Fern Creek Elementary ranked 567th out of 704 schools.  The scores are in the bottom quartile and the school is failing.  Here’s the 2010-11 data from schooldigger.com; :

Here are Fern Creek Elementary’s 2010-11 scores from the KY School Report Card which shows that scores have declined to 71.5% proficient/distinguished in reading and 60.3% prof/dist in math:.:

As black enrollment declined, academic performance declined, too.  So much for white kids providing a positive influence on black kids.

Census data shows that African-American population is 10% in the 40291 zip code, where Fern Creek Elementary is located.  Looks like JCPS is still using race for admissions criteria.  ILLEGAL!

Conclusion: JCPS likes forcibly busing black kids to failing schools.  If you have come up with a different conclusion, do tell.

One last data blast:

Let’s take a quick peak at Carter Traditional Elementary which is located in the 40211 zip code.

2010 census data shows that the 40211 population was 22,612; 21,626 of the residents were African-American.  96% of the residents are black.  Carter’s enrollment is only 34% black and the school is on the ragged edge of having scores in the top quartile.  Great job, kids and teachers!

Black kids being bused out of their neighborhoods even though they have a neighborhood school that performs significantly better than one that puts them on a bus for at least three hours a day.

This is crazy! Bring back those neighborhood schools!

—————————————-

See you on Wednesday: “Is anyone at JCPS smarter than a sixth grader?”  It’ll be short but sweet!

YES!  Forced busing can get much worse than a three- to four-hour, sixty-mile daily commute.  Elementary-age students are enduring grueling commutes to attend some of the worst schools in the state of Kentucky.   They’re getting home after 5 p.m. and bus crashes are becoming a pretty regular news event.  This is awful!

Let’s discuss.

On Monday, nine JCPS students were injured in an accident at the Watterson Expressway eastbound and Crittenden Drive.  Last I read, they’re doing okay.

Just click on the pic below from WHAS-11 to read the whole story.

Some details about the bus route:

* The students were picked up at King and Young Elementary Schools which are located in the western-most part of Jefferson County.

* They were headed to a bus depot at Moore Traditional High School which is in southern Louisville, close to the Gene Snyder. That’s a pretty long haul for the fourteen kids on board.  (I know.  Fourteen.)

Here’s where King Elemetary is located in case you’re new to town:

More details:

* Elementary schools dismiss at 3:45 p.m. (and some schools dismiss a little earlier to get a headstart on long bus rides.  Shh!  It’s a secret!  They dismissed even earlier on the first day of school!) and the accident occurred one hour later at 4:45 p.m.

* When the bus crashed, they weren’t even halfway home! Not yet.  They had traveled just 11 miles from King, had another 19 miles to go AND they had to board another bus at the depot.  We’re looking at a 1.5 hour one-way commute if everything clicks along wreck-free and delay-free. It’s likely that these kids easily have a two-hour commute most days.

How many of you commute two hours a day? Anybody? If so, let’s hear your salary!   These kids are being forcibly bused to two extraordinarily low-performing elementary schools.  King Elementary ranks 695th out of 704 elementary schools in Kentucky. Young, a magnet school (Really?  A magnet?), ranks slightly better at 619th.

Is putting thousands of really young children through all of this BS really worth a diversity agenda that just makes a lot of smug grown-ups feel good?

Let’s do this:  At the very least, get rid of forced busing for JCPS’ elementary students and hire two teaching assistants for every classroom in every failing school.

Less transportation, more education.

Pay attention.

Richard Innes at the Bluegress Institute for Public Policy Solutions has generated a short but sweet report that reveals an ugly truth about busing.   Don’t worry.  It’s not some meandering snoozer like you’ll find in the op-ed section of the Crapola-Journal.  Innes backs up his report with real data like this hair-raising little number:

His report, Blacks Still Falling in the GAP in Louisville’s Schools, is your absolute must-read for today.  The information about achievement gaps is great stuff but his best data reveals graduation rates and academic performance at neighborhood schools for West End residents.

FUN FACT:  Black students from the West End have higher test scores and higher graduation rates at West End schools than at East End schools.  

I’m absolutely sure that that three-hour daily commute to the East End for those West End kids is a real asskicker.  Imagine being a JCPS student who’s been forcibly bused since kindergarten.  If you had any energy left, you’d probably be pretty sick of school.

Anyway, here’s a little quote from the report to get you to click on the BIPPS link:

We found alarming geographic patterns in the worst white versus black achievement gaps, with the largest gaps generally found on the East side of town.  For this analysis, we only looked at schools where the mathematics achievement gap exceeded 30 percentage points – a difference far too high to be acceptable under any condition.

It turns out that, regardless of school level, most of the ‘biggest gap’ schools are found East of Interstate 65.

Thank you to Mr. Innes for this compelling study.

In case you don’t know who Deborah Yetter is, she is one-half of the Crapola-Journal’s editorial board. That be two people, folks.  JUST TWO.

Hey, Yetter!  The reason kids don’t walk to school is because JCPS is either busing their rear ends across town or they’ve opted out of the public school system altogether.  Those thousands and thousands of non-JCPS students are heading to Collegiate or St. Raphael or fill-in-the-blank and adding to rush hour congestion.

OMG!  This is unbelievable!

aaa

aa

Are you ready for this? Christopher Fell is one of the parents who sued Jefferson County Public Schools because his daughter was denied admission/enrollment to her suburban neighborhood school. JCPS preferred to ship Fell’s then-first-grader all the way across town but ended up totally infuriating the wrong guy. (If you want the details, just click here to read more.)   Needless to say, this is a guy who seriously supports neighborhood schools.  

Mr. Fell wants to be on the board of education to look out for the best interests of our children and community, PERIOD. He’s absolutely not interested in receiving piles of cash from the teachers’ union to pay for mailings and yard signs. That means no quid pro quo with this guy and you gotta love that.  Nobody is going to tell this guy to vote for salary increases and tax increases just because he received some free t-shirts for his campaign.  (Read: Please make a donation to his campaign! And thank you, thank you, thank you!!)

I have a lot more to tell you about Mr. Fell but I’ll save it for later!  It’s all great stuff.

Here’s a link to his website: Christopher Fell for JCPS Board of Education 2012

Mr. Fell gave me permission to reprint his recent Facebook post – see below.  Enjoy!

***********************************************************************

It is now official. The race for the JCPS Board of Education is heating up. Including myself, there are now three prospects vying for Larry Hujo’s [District 7] seat  on the Board of Education. The other two are a man named Chris Brady, who might I add only has a page on Facebook and not an actual account (https://www.facebook.com/electchrisbrady/info).  Seems to me he’d rather be in contact with the people of the county when it’s convenient for him. Mr. Brady’s website (http://www.bradyschoolboard.com/) only shows information about himself and what he wants done as new Board of Education member. Why not take the extra steps and show how you’re going to get it done as I have, Mr. Brady? When it comes to the future education of my children and every other child in this district, sitting down and taking the time to think ahead is crucial. Mr. Brady has a long way to go to prove his intentions are true. Mr. Brady is also endorsed by none other than Larry Hujo, a long-time supporter of the student assignment policy as well as ignoring the fact that bullying exists within our school walls at all levels. Great person to be endorsed by.

The third person running is a man named James Sexton. He has no Facebook page set up; no website where we can learn about him; nothing whatsoever except what our esteemed colleagues at the Courier-Journal want to write about him.

August 14, 2012, is the filing deadline for candidates for the Board of Education. On August 15, 2012, I will begin sending out fliers, stickers, fundraising letters, endorsement letters, pencils, pens, magnets, calendars and letters of permission to place yard signs to every household in the District 7 area. The time is now for a change. The choice is up to every single voter, however, and I am one who will respect the decision of those voters. I am also available anytime if someone would like to discuss an issue face to face instead of through a computer screen. JCPS needs to regain the #1 spot in Kentucky that it once held. I can’t do it alone though. I need the great people of Jefferson County to band with me and make our school system as great as it once was.

“Let’s Make A Brighter Tomorrow For Our Children…Starting Today”

One last thing, I have talked to Mandy Connell [at WHAS] and if the other two candidates are up for it, we can have a live debate on her radio show in September. If not, then I will go on air without them.

Thanks for your support, everyone.

Our board members will give the angst-ridden performance of their lives when they tell the Crapola-Journal that it was tough to implement a one-year pay freeze for administrative positions.  I’m sure the six-figure Van Hoose goons will be just fine clipping a few coupons and packing lunches for the next year.  Wait until you hear about Linda Duncan’s motion to pass out $500 gift cards like candy to everyone who didn’t receive raises.  (Estimated cost: $450,000)  Well, I have real data to give you instead of butt-kissy repeats from JCPS press releases – and you know where you can find those.

Stephen Imhoff, local ambulance chaser and former (Gasp! Yes, former!) chairman of the Jefferson County Board of Education, stated in last night’s board meeting that JCPS employees have received $40 million in raises in the past four years.  That’s a pretty shocking number, isn’t it?

I have some numbers that are even more shocking.

Today, we’re going to look at the twenty lowest-performing elementary schools in Kentucky and how many JCPS schools are in the bottom 20.  All of the data is from schooldigger.com.

Here’s how JCPS’ elementary schools have performed on annual standardized tests over the past five years while tens of millions of dollars have been passed out in gratuitous raises by the Jefferson County Board of Education:

aaa

aa

And here’s how those numbers look in a graph.  It’s sooo ugly

Is the data trend for elementary schools just a fluke?  Well, here are some numbers for JCPS middle schools – I just looked at the ten lowest-performing middle schools this time (not 20) – I’ll work on more details later.  These numbers are just as bad. 

aaa

aaa

Here’s the scary chart without the fun graphics:

The Crapola-Journal and JCPS really need to stop blaming poverty and low parent involvement (which is a consequence of busing children all over the county, by the way) for these alarming numbers.  It’s cruel and pathetic to keep blaming low-income kids for JCPS’ poor performance.  Grown-ups are the problem here.  Solidly middle-class JCPS employees are to blame along with their shithead friends at the Crapola-Journal.

Enough with blaming the poor already.  Nobody is buying it anymore.

This reminds me of Geoffrey Canada’s comment in Waiting for Superman (see below, around 8:34):

So, you’re a kid and you’re doing fine in school till you hit the fourth grade, fifth grade. Between the fifth grade and the seventh grade you see a huge number of minority kids go from being B students to D students. Now, one of two things is happening. Either the kids are getting stupider, right?  Or something is wrong in the education system.

Something is definitely wrong with the education system in Louisville. So, do you care enough to vote out the present members of the board of education? Please say yes.  Tell your friends and family.  Let’s get some fresh board members who really care about children and their education instead of the teachers’ union and forced busing.

Our children are not getting dumber, JCPS just wants you to believe they are.

aaa

By Maury Z. Levy

IT WAS RAINING NOW. It was Monday morning and the thick gray air was chilly and damp and it was raining now. The skies had been holding it in for a week and now they had 
burst open to soak the streets and break the promise of 
an early summer. People walked along quickly under black umbrellas with their collars up and their faces down and 
automobiles with snow tires still on made a whirring sound as they moved up Susquehanna Avenue, heading 
for the Mansion and the Park, never stopping.

For a week, it had been summer again. For a week, the 
kids with bandanas around their heads roamed the streets in shirtsleeves, while men stood together on corners and 
drank the contents of brown paper bags and women in 
housedresses pushed strollers up and down 17th Street looking for bargains.

For a week, the desperation of North Philadelphia was no longer quiet. For one great week of Indian spring North Philadelphia was alive and ticking with anticipation of the warmth ahead and some memories of some heat behind.

But the Monday morning rain put things back to normal. It was trash day and the beginning of another week.

The flat-red pushcart of the 15th Street Junk Shop 
made its way up French Street toward 17th. The man behind it was old and black and he was wearing a dark 
plastic raincoat with the hood up over his head and the drawstring knotted around his chin so that all that could 
be seen were the slits of eyes that stalked the curbside cans for salvage.

He pushed his way between the cars parked on one  side of the narrow street of ancient brownstones. It was the side of the street with the signs that read “NO PARKING 
MONDAY 7 AM TO 7 PM-PARK OTHER SIDE.” It was 7:20 
a.m. and French Street was asleep.

Bucking traffic, he turned right on 17th and pushed past 
the cozy old James L. Claghorn Elementary School. The rain made the gray 84-year-old building wetgray.

Claghorn takes up less than a third of the block. It is 
surrounded by a big black iron fence that comes to within a few feet of the tiny building. Pressing against one side 
of the fence—in what is supposed to be a schoolyard—is a black iron pole that holds a slightly bent basketball 
backboard. There isn’t even enough room in the yard for a half-court game and even less room to hang the blame, because back in 1884 outdoor sports were not exactly national pastimes.

Claghorn sticks out—an ancient school in a procession of old stores. The building was supposed to be torn down 
back in 1944, when it had reached its 60th birthday, but 
that was a war year and people had more important 
things to do than break up little old schools. Somehow it 
never got back on the demolition list and so for the past 
24 years Claghorn has been living on borrowed time.

Across the street from Claghorn is a luncheonette, the 
hub of what little activity there is at 7:30 on a Monday 
morning. There is a bus stop on the corner there and a 
handful of people were huddled in the doorway of the 
luncheonette to avoid the downpour and wait for their 
bus.

It was 7:40 now and the bus hadn’t come yet and the 
doorway was filled to capacity. As they craned their necks 
to watch for the bus, none of the people in the doorway 
seemed to take notice of the scattering of kids who 
made their way down 17th Street toward Claghorn, 
soggy brown lunch bags firmly in hand.

It was 7:40 and classes at Claghorn, like most other 
schools in the city, don’t start until 9 o’clock. But these 
kids weren’t getting there an hour and twenty minutes 
ahead of time because they wanted to shoot up some 
baskets in their schoolyard.

In fact, it isn’t even their schoolyard. For these kids, 
Claghorn is nothing more than a bus terminal. Their real 
school is Gilbert Spruance Elementary School, which is 
located a mere 9-mile bus ride away at Levick and Horrocks Streets, which, for the information of anyone not 
completely familiar with the territory, is located in Oxford 
Circle.

The bus leaves Claghorn at 8:05 on the nose. It’s been 
leaving at 8:05 for three years now, ever since some guys 
down at 21st and the Parkway decided that to relieve over­
crowding and to help integration, it would be nice to 
take a bunch of black kids and plop them on a bus every morning and give them a joyride from their ancient elementary school in the North Philly slums to a sparkling 
physical plant in the heart of the bustling, lily-white Northeast.

And so the kids came, unheralded and unescorted on 
this dripping Monday, to catch the 8:05 for Fun Circle.

They came and gathered in clusters, some in the foyer 
of the school, others in the green, wood-soaked doorway 
of a boarded-up grocery store on the corner of 17th and 
French. The store, like many others in the neighborhood, 
used to belong to a Jewish couple back in the days when 
nearby Strawberry Mansion was Jewish turf. But the 
Jews are gone now, gone for the greenfields of the Northeast. There are no Jewish kids on the 8:05.

AT FIVE OF EIGHT, the bright orange school bus makes a 
right on Broad Street at Susquehanna and sways its way, 
like a giant metal mule, up to 17th Street.

The driver stops the bus at the side of Claghorn and 
while the kids file out into the rain he mechanically wipes 
the fog off the windows, methodically pulls the lever that 
opens the door that lets the kids get out of the rain and 
onto the bus, and sinks back into his seat as he opens up the 
morning paper.

The kids file onto the bus quiet and orderly, each to 
his assigned seat, each barely acknowledging the matron, 
who stands sternly at the front and stares straight ahead 
with the poise of a Nazi submarine captain scanning his 
periscope.

She runs a tight bus.

BUS REGULATIONS: ENTER AND LEAVE BUS IN 
ORDERLY MANNER. BE QUIET-NO LOUD TALKING 
OR SINGING. REMAIN IN YOUR SEATS UNTIL BUS 
STOPS. KEEP ARMS, HANDS AND HEAD INSIDE BUS. KEEP BUS CLEAN. NO EATING PERMITTED.

The rules are tight, and after a two-day weekend back 
home, the kids are pretty much uptight. They are facing 
the prospect of a new week and another five days on 
the 8:05.

They come with their spitdown hair and spitdown manners and they sit and they stare straight ahead, never looking out. There is really nothing to look out on. No mothers there for a warm send-off, no fathers in parked 
cars waiting for them to leave. The kids range in age 
from seven to twelve and they are old enough to take care of themselves. If not, they’ll learn soon enough. They have to.

On a full day, there are 55 of them. A hundred and ten eyes staring straight ahead at the bus regulations sign. Many of them can’t read it, but they all know what
it says. They aren’t allowed to forget. The matron makes 
sure of that.

She is a big, black, unsmiling overseer who is paid by 
the Board of Education to make sure that the kids don’t forget what the sign says. She sits in her command seat, the first one by the door, eyes trained on her underlings.

And the kids sit passively. Today, most of them are 
wearing their winter wrappings again. Last week it was 
warm and they came in short sleeves and cotton dresses. But now the damp chill of early spring was back and so 
were their winter clothes. A mother named Nature had 
given them four seasons every year, but many of their 
own mothers just can’t afford the luxury. So it’s either hot 
or it’s cold and today it was cold.

The matron is wearing a black spring raincoat and the 
bus driver is wearing a bus driver’s suit with the hat 
cocked back on his head.

The bus driver is short and on rare occasions he speaks. 
He is paid to drive the bus, not to keep order. That’s what 
the matron is there for. But somewhere along the way, 
somebody must have reminded him that he is white and 
that everyone behind him is black and that it would be 
nice if he would try to make his bus a nice place to live.

And so he comes up with such gems as, “We’re gonna be 
good little girls and boys, aren’t we?” Most of the time, 
intentionally or not, he is talking to himself.

The matron is not so subtle.

“Siddown and shuddup, Eugene,” she shoots at an older kid in the next-to-last seat who is standing and talking 
and wearing a heavy brown coat and a sheepish grin.

IT IS 8:04 NOW and the bus driver is reaching for his 
gearshift as he spots a thin figure running down the 
patent leather street, directly at him. He opens the door 
again and a woman leaps onto the first step. She is young and wet and worried. Her large pleading eyes meet those 
of the matron just a few inches away. The matron stares back at her with immovable pellets. Nothing had been 
said, but the conversation was already over.

“Won’t you let Cal ride?” the young woman begs.

“He can’t,” the matron starts almost before the question 
is finished. “He blocks up the aisle. He won’t behave. He 
carries on.”

The matron clicks her heels under her seat and turns her back, spitting another “siddown” to the kids in the back.

“Steven, get in your seat,” she orders. Steven, wearing 
the remains of an oversized yellow canvas raincoat, settles 
onto the edge of his seat and stares impassively through 
the hazy windows and the driving rain at Claghorn.

8:05 and the bus starts to roll. Steven half turns in his 
seat and his eyes follow Cal’s mother back into the rain.

“Steven, turn around.”

The ride takes 25 minutes. It always takes 25 minutes. 
The bus driver takes the side streets, the back streets, the 
front streets, anything he needs to speed him up or slow 
him down to make sure that the ride takes exactly 25 
minutes.

The bus grunts its way down 17th Street to funky, funky Diamond Street, where something called the Tanner Duckrey Elementary School is being pieced together. It is big 
and brick and new and one day it might even put the 
8:05 into retirement. The Duckrey School will relieve 
overcrowding and it will be all black. But right now it’s 
only another promise to the kids on the 8:05 as they zip 
past Duckrey, up Diamond to Broad.

It gets pretty stuffy in a big orange school bus when there are fifty-some kids with heavy coats and the windows are closed to keep out the rain. It gets pretty stuffy 
and the kids get pretty restless. Steven gets the word again as the bus weaves in and out of the Broad Street 
traffic. The matron now has her eyes fixed on the back 
of the bus because her instinct tells her that’s where 
today’s hotspot is.

As the bus passes under the fleeting darkness of a 
bridge near North Philly station, a little girl in the first seat behind the matron slips into her lunch bag and comes 
out with a handful of cheese twists. Her eyes point up to the matron in caution. The matron is staring at the back. The girl quickly clops her hand against her mouth and 
shoves all the cheese twists in at once. She looks again at 
the matron, who is still on a fixed focus to the rear, and 
madly starts to chomp away. Breakfast at last.

THE BUS HAS CUT ITS WAY through the mist and onto Roosevelt Boulevard, where the rain is little more than a 
moderate drizzle. The kids are quiet now, their eyes transfixed on the first real signs of another country. The houses 
are bigger and newer and the streets are wider. The bus 
takes the Oxford Circle underpass to Large Street, right past colonial Temple Shalom to Robbins Avenue and 
down the lumpy block to Horrocks.

Spruance is just a block away and the kids in the bus 
can look out to see some of their classmates walking to
school under brightly colored umbrellas. The kids under the umbrellas aren’t looking back.

It is not really an upsetting factor for anyone in Oxford Circle to see somebody with a black face riding a bus 
into their all-white bastion. It’s been going on for years on the PTC. The only differences this time are the ages 
of the riders, the color of the bus, and the fact that when 
they leave, they don’t collect ten bucks and carfare.

Oxford Circle, though, is changing. It used to be that 
when you spoke of Oxford Circle, you were talking of 
two things—both a geographic location and a way of life.

Physically, Oxford Circle is actually a triangle bounded
by Roosevelt Boulevard, Castor Avenue and Cottman 
Avenue. But since the mass migration to Oxford Circle, 
which began in the late ’40s and peaked in the early ’50s, 
the influence of the way of life far exceeded the geographic boundaries.

Unless you count noses, there is really no telling how 
many Jews there are in Oxford Circle. They came from 
Strawberry Mansion and South Philly to build a monolithic 
and prosperous Jewish community. And they managed to 
keep it this way for a good twenty years.

But now, Oxford Circle is starting to harden at its 
arteries. Its face is changing, most visibly by a nose job. 
Most of the generation of kids who moved in with their 
parents a couple decades ago have now grown up and gotten married and have gone to set up house in the 
farther reaches of the so-called Greater Northeast.

And left behind are parents with empty houses, many of 
whom end up following the same route as their children and pulling up stakes in favor of a cozy little apartment 
with a swimming pool, just a bit farther out.

The original Oxford Circle way of life is alive and 
thriving just a few miles up the road. Today Oxford Circle, the neighborhood, just ain’t what it used to be. Now you 
need more than one hand to count the Christmas lights. 
So it is not very surprising that the people of Oxford Circle 
now can sit back in their nice little brick row houses with 
the cement patios and the grassy hills in the front and not 
blink when they see a busload of black kids rolling past 
their curbs.

And the kids on the 8:05 have sort of gotten used to 
not being noticed. And as they coast down Horrocks to 
Levick and see the nice new Impalas and Le Sabres stopping in front of Spruance to let off their classmates, it really doesn’t matter much that they have reached the promised land on an orange bus.

IT IS 8:30 on the dot and there is the cocky satisfaction 
of punctuality on the face of the bus driver as he pulls 
his machine to a stop at the side of the school.

For an elementary school, Spruance is massive. The 
school grounds encompass a very large city block. The 
building itself, constructed for the most part in 1950, is 
made of an uncommon-looking yellow brick and there is 
a nice green lawn in the front and a giant cement school-
yard in the back, surrounded by a huge cyclone fence.

The school is right next to the Max Meyers playground, which is owned by the city and has a nice big swimming pool and a whole bunch of basketball courts and grassy baseball fields.

The rain, which had all but stopped now, was good for 
the grass.

The kids are shepherded off the bus, through a big gate 
in the fence and around to one of the back doors and into 
the school, crossing paths along the way with some of the white Spruance kids.

As they enter the neatly scrubbed building, the first thing 
they see is a nicely framed reproduction of Marc Chagall’s 
”The Rabbi.” The painting is there by irony, not design. It’s one of over a hundred pieces of art that hang on the walls of the school. The idea for the display is that of Joseph Agin, the school’s principal. Collecting reproductions of famous paintings is one of his few vices and they are strategically hung all over the place. Right across from Agin’s office is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves and helped make this country what it is today.

On this Monday morning, Agin stands right next to his 
portrait of Abe Lincoln as he watches his children, black 
and white together, file by. He is wearing his permanent-
press smile. Some of the kids smile back, some say hello and 
others just giggle and walk on by. And once he is sure that all of his children are soundly tucked away in their classrooms, Agin walks confidently back to his office to begin another week of principaling. But as he nears the 
office door he is beckoned by a fast-walking, fast-talking 
man in a gray coat and a gray hat who is carrying a black 
attaché case.

“What happened Friday? Why didn’t you do something? 
My kid was afraid to come to school.”

The man in gray was white and he was talking about a 
knifing incident that never happened. There was this 
rumor that spread very quickly that some black kids had 
planned to do some cutting on Friday. It turned out to be 
only a rumor, but it did shake a lot of people up. It shook 
up the man in gray enough for him to stop at school on 
his way to work to try to get to the nitty-gritty of it.

Agin assured him that there was nothing to worry about 
and that it was nothing more than a rumor. They exchanged a few uncertainties and the man in gray started 
to leave and Agin turned and walked past a portrait of John Kennedy and into his office.

Safely inside, he sat down, lit his first cigarette of the 
day and took a large drag.

Agin’s office, furnished in Early Elementary School, is 
fairly large and has a nice view of the neighborhood.

Joe Agin is a middle-aged Jewish man, which is not 
necessarily an indication of his age or religion. It’s just the 
way you get to look when you work in Oxford Circle for 
so long. And Joe Agin has that look about him. After 
eight years at Spruance he looks like the guy who never 
let you read the magazines at the stand in his drugstore.

He leaned back in his chair, took the cigarette from his 
mouth and mused about the knifing rumor. “That’s a big 
problem here—communication—because the parents are 
so far away.”

Agin’s statement was the first of many indications that 
the street of communication between black and white is a 
narrow one paved with eggshells.

When Agin spoke, it was from Levick and Horrocks 
Streets, not from 17th and Susquehanna. “The initial reaction to the busing program was excellent in this neighborhood and still is,” Agin said.

He stopped for another puff on his cigarette as he 
looked out his window. It was still very cloudy as he 
watched the man in gray hustle down the rain-soaked 
walk and into his car.

Agin readily admitted that reaction to the busing from 
the sending end was much harder to gauge since participation by the Negro parents of bused-in children in the Home 
and School Association is nearly negligible.

But together with the Home and School Association, 
Agin is trying everything he can think of to make both 
the parents and the kids feel welcome.

Just this past Christmas, they gave a ball-point pen to 
every kid in the school, regardless of race, creed or means 
of transportation. And engraved on each pen was a two-
word message of brotherhood and peace on earth and 
goodwill to men. It said “Spruance School.”

Agin said that in allocating funds for school use, there is never any question for whom the money is being used. 
”They are definitely Spruance children,” he said with all 
the benign condescension he could muster. “If there is any 
animosity, it is because kids from a lower economic level 
have been bused into an area where the economic level is 
higher. The sending school doesn’t sense any resentment 
among those left behind.”

In the past year, the composition of those left behind 
has changed drastically. When the program first started, 
if they wanted to bus fifty kids, they sent the top fifty. 
Now, they take a random sampling. If there are 200 kids 
at a school and fifty are to be bused, they pick every 
fourth one. “Of course, we’d prefer it the old way,” Agin 
said. “To take the cream of the crop.”

FACT SHEET-HISTORY OF BUSING

To Relieve Overcrowding and Foster Integration School District of Philadelphia, Pa.

•   January, 1964: Board of Education adopts policy calling for redrawing of school boundary lines and busing—to stop double shifts, relieve overcrowding and to foster integration.

•     February, 1964: Busing program begins with 110 pupils bused from all-Negro school to a 95% white school.

•    August, 1964: School District announces plans to expand its busing program (for overcrowding and integration) to some 3000 pupils in September.

•    August, 1964: Parents and Taxpayers Association (all-
white anti-busing group) files suit to stop busing, charging School Board with acting against State School Code and against best interests of city’s school children.

•     September, 1964: School Board buses 3831 children to 
relieve overcrowding and foster integration. Of this number, approximately 1900 are Negro children going to predominantly white schools.

•     December, 1964: Judge Ethan Allen Doty, of Common Pleas Court, dismisses busing suit after one-day court hearing.

•     June, 1965: Busing total has risen to 4527, of which 
2228 are Negroes going to predominantly white schools.

•    September, 1965: School Board buses 7039 children, including 4988 Negroes to predominantly white schools. Ninety-seven schools involved.

•     September, 1966: Busing program expands to 9150 pupils, including about 7000 Negroes to predominantly white schools. Schools involved: 116.

•     September, 1967: Busing program up to 11,664, including about 9000 Negroes to predominantly white 
schools. Schools involved: 130.

“SURPRISINGLY,” Agin said, “it didn’t take too much time for the 
kids to adjust to coming here—only 
getting to the bus a little earlier. 
Children can adjust,” he said.

If she could afford it, Cal’s mother 
would probably have that statement laminated for her wallet. Evidently, 
Cal couldn’t adjust. Cal is the kid 
who wasn’t allowed to ride the bus, 
and the real reason Cal couldn’t ride 
the bus is that he is under suspension. He won’t be back unless his mother comes to school to iron out everything and to assure everyone that Cal won’t make any more waves.

The people at Spruance are very wave-conscious and they want to make 
sure that everyone fits in as perfectly
and smoothly as possible. The bused-in 
kids are balanced into classrooms very 
carefully. There are 55 from Claghorn 
and if they go into five classes, that 
means 11 in each class. Only special arithmetic and reading classes are structured and kids are placed according to their ability. “We have 
found that quite a number of the children from the sending schools
were behind,” Agin said.

GEORGIE IS ONE OF THE KIDS On the 
8:05. He lives on one floor of a crumbling brownstone, along with his 
mother and 13 brothers and sisters.

Georgie can’t read very well. He is 
in the fifth grade at Spruance and he 
is reading at a third-grade level.

The people at Spruance have been trying to help Georgie, but they
haven’t had much effect because they only have him for a few hours a day, and when Georgie gets back home he finds it a little hard to practice his reading in a nice quiet place with 14 other people around.

Conditions at Georgie’s house have 
gotten a little better though. He used to share one bed with six of his 
brothers. But a couple of months ago someone was nice enough to give Georgie’s mother a slightly used mattress, which she plopped on the floor and now four of the kids are sleeping on it—to relieve overcrowding and foster public health.

But the new mattress hasn’t helped 
Georgie’s reading problem any. What Georgie and his family need is real help and that help is not about to 
come from anyone at Spruance because when Georgie leaves school at 3:15 and goes back home, he is no longer their problem. There has been 
little effort by anyone at Spruance to try to help the home situation. The
farthest they go is to give the teacher the option of writing a note on Georgie’s report card alluding to the problem. Something like “Please include a study when you get around to building the new wing on your house.”

“IT TAKES UP a lot of the faculty’s 
time, trying to raise their level,” Agin 
said. And the faculty has enough 
things to do to keep it busy. Things
like maintaining the cool.

Agin admitted that there are minor disciplinary problems, and that the 
handling of such problems is complicated by the fact that the bused-in child can’t be kept after school. The

bus must leave promptly and everyone must be on it.

There has been a definite increase 
in certain disciplinary problems since 
the busing program started. Agin attributes this to the fact that “there are certain standards of behavior that some of these kids need to learn—
their behavior is probably based on their background.”

One of the problems is the use of 
profanity. There have been many complaints from Spruance parents that 
their kids come home from school using words that warrant mouthwashing. The picking up of profanity has 
long been one of the evergreen arguments against busing. And it does have a basis in fact because the kids do pick up some bad words at an early age in school. Under normal circumstances, it would probably be another year or two before the kids picked these words up at home and brought them to school.

“Kids adapt to a situation,” Agin said. “There is some fighting here but 
it is mostly among the colored children 
themselves, not among colored and 
white children. I would like to say it’s a way of life for them. They’re taught to take care of themselves, and their differences are settled by fighting.”

They have tried to promote the 
right attitudes at Spruance by means 
of special programs. There is one 
where they try to teach the kids to be 
very tolerant of others. It is called “The Green Circle Brotherhood Program,” which is really the name of a bi-racial rock group. They feel that antagonism can be eliminated by programs like this. “That is why there 
is fighting only in their own groups,” 
said Agin. “There is a tendency for 
the 11- and 12-year-old children to 
segregate much more so than the 
younger ones,” he said.

Agin was on his third cigarette now 
and he was starting to turn on. “With three or four schools represented here [currently, there are 280 kids bused-in 
to Spruance from three schools in 
North Philadelphia, and they make up 
about one-third of the school's present 
population], there is more of a tendency for areas to compete, but we haven’t had any white versus colored 
business.”

There have been some manifestations of economic resentment among the “richer” and “poorer” kids at Spruance. It has turned up most in 
the lunchroom where there have been 
incidents of stealing that were not 
sensed before. “Petty thievery,” Agin 
calls it, “like pencils, books and 
lunches.”

But most of the kids come to school 
with something in their stomach. And 
if they don’t there is a program that 
allows them two pints of milk a day, 
free of charge. Also, most of the 
bused-in kids either carry their lunches 
to school or come with enough money 
to buy one. (For about 35¢ you can get 
a pretty good gut-full from the 
Spruance lunchroom.) “And if they 
don’t have the money, we will buy 
them lunch from our own pockets,” 
Agin said.

He explained that the help program 
goes even farther than lunches. “If we spot a person who needs clothing, we have clothing from residents in the area. In providing clothing, we take from other schools so that a child can’t point to a dress a little girl is wearing and say, ‘That used to 
be mine.’ “

Agin took another puff on his cigarette and half-smiled as he turned to look out upon the benevolent citizens of Horrocks Street. Outside, the sun was trying to burn its way through the clouds and women with baby strollers and shopping carts had begun to appear, going about their delayed daily business. It got Joe Agin to thinking about how Oxford Circle 
is changing and talking about the area that Spruance services. It was obvious 
that he was thinking more than he 
was talking. “We have few gentiles,” 
he said, of a school that never even 
thought seriously about them. “But
more than we used to. Someday, this 
may be a problem. Previously, this neighborhood was the next step up 
from Strawberry Mansion. Now 
they’re moving in from all over—
Kensington and all over the city.” Agin seemed to be talking almost to himself now as a somewhat puzzled 
look crossed his face as he thought 
of the past and future of Oxford Circle.

“The reason kids were bused in 
here was that we had room,” he went 
on. “People with school-age children started to move away. At one time 
the population of this school was two 
thousand, but that was a few years 
back when this neighborhood was 
booming with kids. Now we’re down to about eight or nine hundred, and 
we’ve got plenty of room. So I’ve become the vulnerable one.”

Agin reiterated that those families
left in the neighborhood have taken the whole thing very well—at least 
there hasn’t been any sign of mass exodus since the busing started, and 
property values have remained about the same.

Acceptance has been both passive and active. Some of the bused-in kids 
have been invited home for lunch by
some of the kids in the neighborhood. 
They are not allowed to miss the bus 
to go to parties after school, though.

Agin admitted that it took some time for the invitations to start coming. “They had to wait for the formation of friendships.” He feels that the neighborhood kids shouldn’t be actively encouraged to take a Claghorn kid to lunch. Official encouragement might 
lead to neighborhood criticism. And criticism is one thing that Joe Aging doesn’t want to encourage.

From the start, he has tried to make sure that everyone involved knew exactly what was going on. He tried, the best he could, to have the neighborhood parents recognize the need for busing and become better informed about it. “Right from the beginning, 
we gave them the whole picture,” he 
said. “And by arranging them heterogeneously, we avoided having a presaid.

When the program first began, Agin 
spent quite a bit of time trying to 
indoctrinate the parents of the bused-in kids. He attended meetings with 
them down at the Claghorn School 
and spoke to them and invited them to 
visit Spruance. But that was three 
years ago, and he hasn’t seen very 
many of them since.

Some of the parents do come up when they are invited for such special occasions as teacher visitation, but few of them ever make it for regular Home and School Association meetings. Those who have come expressed concern mostly over the facilities at Spruance, the lunchroom in particular. Since their kids would be eating 
there every day, they had a natural concern over what was being served. 
Most of the parents were pleased with 
the facilities and pleased with what 
they saw and pleased that they had 
come. And at least one of them kept 
coming. And coming and coming.

THERE IS A LITTLE ROOM just down the hallway from the principal’s office 
that has a sign on it that says “HOME 
& SCHOOL ASSOCIATION.” Actually it’s not really a room, it’s a converted 
book closet, and really, if you took 
all of the active members of the 
Spruance Home and School Association and put them all together at one 
time, they would quite easily fit into a book closet, with plenty of room left over for a couple of pinball machines.

Seated in the barely furnished room 
this morning for an impromptu meeting were five members of the Association. One of them was black and she dominated the meeting. Her name was Earthilee Gray and she was the neatly 
scrubbed mother of an equally neatly scrubbed bused-in son, and somewhat of a new breed of cat.

Earthilee is an honest-to-goodness
black yenta with Della Reese intonations and Eartha Kitt tendencies. She 
sat at a wooden table with some papers in front of her and, with one 
profound pronouncement, she brought 
the informal conversation to a halt and 
got down to the business at hand.

“I’d like to make a statement,” she 
said, as if to give fair warning to all 
the hypothetical news cameras present to start rolling. “I have visited 
this school as much as any other 
mother, if not more,” she said, and you just knew it was more. “Not because of integration, although I’m for freedom and equal rights and all the things people are fighting for, but because I’m interested in my son getting a good education. I’ve sacrificed hours to get here, and I’ve eaten lunch here with the kids. The general picture I’ve gotten here is that there is 
no direct adverseness on anyone’s 
part.”

She did admit, however, that at 
meetings some people did refuse to 
even say hello to her, but she did 
not consider this adverseness. “I’d 
rather just leave it up to their own 
intelligence,” she said.

What she’s interested in primarily, 
she reiterated, not for the last time, 
was that her child was getting a well-
rounded education, regardless of integration. Although she admitted that her child had never told her that he had been abused or had seen the staring eyes of hate, Earthilee Gray said she felt sure that Oxford Circle parents are telling their kids not to play with black kids.

“We need more involvement at 
home as well as with teachers, principals and administrators,” she said. “I 
have talked with parents in my neighborhood. Some feel that the teachers at Spruance are very prejudiced. I’ve 
been given statements that have said so, but I never told anyone here because I thought they were too petty.”

Somehow, Joe Agin had squeezed 
his way into the closet to give Earthilee Gray a verbal pat on the head: “I 
value your opinion more than the opinion of a parent whose kid is a 
disciplinary problem, who tends to be 
more prejudiced. You are more unbiased than other parents who pass judgment in a biased way.”

Everyone at Spruance knows Earthilee Gray. She is in such close contact 
with the teachers that when she talks of her son’s education, she says, “I 
had a wonderful teacher last term,” or, “We have a real gem this term.”

Earthilee Gray is not at all typical of her community and she knows it. 
But she is perhaps very typical of a new breed of outspoken leader with bootstraps whose influence can and 
will be felt by anyone she comes in contact with, and the people at 
Spruance know that well.

She is part of a black middle class 
that has suddenly become militant in this country over the past few years. She owns her own beauty parlor and makes enough money from it to comfortably and smartly furnish her house and herself. She is the first to tell you what a helping hand she has been to her neighborhood and how she takes other mothers’ kids to ball games and
gives them lunches and new shirts when their own become too tattered.

Earthilee Gray makes her kid wear a necktie to school even though she 
knows that he gets beaten up on the
bus a lot because of it. And she is 
the first one to respond with a kneejerk 
defense, usually in the form of a letter, a phone call or a visit, when her 
kid is in any danger of having his 
tie stepped on. The tie serves more as 
a status symbol than an adornment. Earthilee Gray knows where she’s at. 
She’s the first to scorn a lot of the people in her neighborhood who “don’t want to work.”

And she is well aware of what the
people in her neighborhood think 
about her. “You think you’re scared in that neighborhood,” she tells her white soul sisters. “Well, I’m doubly 
scared. I can’t leave a window or door unlocked.”

Earthilee Gray’s minor confession 
of weakness gave the white mothers present an opportunity to jump in.

First, there was the president of 
the Home and School Association, Ruth MacAndrew (MacAndrew!? There goes the neighborhood). Yet despite her looks and her name, she 
too had definite yenta tendencies. “Look, let’s face it, we don’t want reverse busing,” she said, as though someone had brought the subject up. 
”All we want is a good education for our kids.”

Also there were three Jewish mothers. There was Gloria Richman, a well-dressed woman with a giant opal ring and a puffed-up hairdo. With her were Jeannette Toman and Gilda Dunoff.

Jeannette Toman looks like the 
kind of mother who would probably make her kids wear earmuffs in April. Gilda Dunoff was later to be affectionately described by Joe Agin as “the quiet one.” The three of them 
chimed in almost in unison with Ruth MacAndrew.

“We just don’t want reverse busing.”

This, Ruth MacAndrew said, was 
the initial reaction of most of the 
parents when they learned of the 
busing program. Busing was a good 
idea for relieving overcrowding and 
fostering integration, just so long as 
it didn’t inconvenience their kids.

She felt that the parents hadn’t 
been “informed right” about the busing when it first started. “A lot gets 
blown up, you know,” she said. “At 
first, many parents got the impression that the busing was simply to promote integration and not primarily for the sake of education.”

Earthilee Gray was alive and stirring again now, and saying that the only disadvantage of the busing program was that she had to get up at 
six o’clock in the morning to have breakfast with her son. “If there is 
any prejudice between children, it is 
taught in the homes,” she said from 
her seat in left field.

Ruth MacAndrew said that there 
has been a “slowdown” in the learning 
pace in classrooms that have bused-in 
kids. “Not everyone is ready to go 
on.”

Everyone was getting into the fray 
now and all kinds of things were 
starting to bounce off of the walls, in 
no particular direction Earthilee Gray said that another problem with busing 
was the fact that if a Claghorn kid 
gets sick in school, it is too far for 
the parent to come get him. She grabbed at the opportunity of having the floor again to get in a word about discipline: “If my child needs slapping, slap him, I always say.”

Gilda Dunoff turned to Earthilee Gray and said, “If all Negro mothers were like you, there would be no problems.”

Jeannette Toman said that the language coming home with the kids has changed since the busing began. “It has put the parents a little more on the ball,” she said.

“It’s a real eye-opener, eh?” chimed 
in Joe Agin from somewhere.

Gloria Richman told how her son 
has been ridiculed for his friendship with “a lovely little colored boy.”

Earthilee Gray said that the black kids from Spruance come home to a 
segregated neighborhood and that when they do, some of their parents 
think that they are “too good to go out and play with the other kids.” 
She doesn’t consider herself to be one of those parents, because every day, 
weather permitting, when her kid
comes home, she lets him take off his 
tie and get on his bike and ride around the neighborhood for forty-five minutes. Exactly forty-five minutes.

Jeannette Toman said to Earthilee Gray “there are not many of your people at the Home and School 
meetings.”

“They feel they’re outcasts,” Earthilee Gray said. “They feel they may 
be out of place or not accepted.” She felt that the teas that were held 
before the busing started were helpful 
for the parents at the different schools 
to get to know what was going on, but that the next step is for the teachers to get involved in the home life. 
She also cited a need for “more 
meaningful parental involvement.”

Ruth MacAndrew, who schedules 
all of her Home and School meetings during the day, when most of the 
black parents couldn’t come if they wanted to, said that white parents feel education is falling behind because 
there are too many discipline problems in the classrooms. This was Joe 
Agin’s bag and he was quick to blame 
whatever lag there has been in the 
classrooms on the teachers.

Everyone present agreed that they 
are walking on eggshells and that communication is not what it should 
be because of what Joe Agin called “the Black Power thing.”

“Sometimes you just don’t know 
what to say or how to say it so that 
it doesn’t come out sounding wrong,” 
Gloria Richman said.

Earthilee Gray said that she even 
felt shaky about what she said in her own neighborhood because she thinks 
that many people resent the fact that 
her kid goes to Spruance.

“Education of the parents in that 
neighborhood can only come from 
their own people,” Jeannette Toman 
said. “What is needed is more people 
like Earthilee. But see, they resent 
her too.”

Yes, everyone there was convinced 
that if all black people were like 
Earthilee Gray, there would be no 
problems and that everyone could live 
together in harmony. They all looked 
at Earthilee Gray and the air reeked 
with brotherhood as smiles crossed 
their faces and bells rang.

IT WAS RECESS.

Out in the schoolyard, the sun had broken all the way through and except for a heavy and chilly breeze it was turning out to be not too bad a day after all.

Out in the schoolyard was where it 
was really happening. It was where the kids were all on their own and didn’t have to listen to the bigoted
garbage from their parents or swallow any of the brotherhood bullshit that was stuffed down their throats in school.

Out in the schoolyard was where 
kids could be kids. And it is here that
the ultimate test of integration is being 
taken. It is here where there is no supervision and nobody to tell the 
kids what to do or not to do. It is 
the things that happen in the schoolyard that these kids are going to remember ten, twenty, thirty years from now, and not anything that is told to them in a classroom about race relations. Most of them don’t even know what race relations are. All they know 
is that they are kids. They are kids and 
they are beautiful.

While their mothers are inside for a session of para-liberal mutual back-patting, the kids are out in the sun, black and white together, with their arms around each other.

In one corner of the yard was a gaggle of girls jumping rope, and there was a black girl holding one end of 
the rope and a white girl holding the other. And nobody had to tell them 
to do that, because it just happened 
and none of them even thought about 
it.

Across the yard, there was a softball 
game going on and it was the same
scene.

It was a choose-up game, which 
means that you start out with two captains and they alternately pick kids to be on their team. And when you’re playing baseball in a schoolyard you’re playing to win, and so the selections of
team members are made with all the 
calculation of a professional draft. When your pick comes up, you don’t take a buddy, you take the best available ballplayer. And that’s just what 
the kids did. It was an integrated game, but nobody had to tell them to make it one.

Just past center field, there was a 
fight going on. The fight was between 
a white kid and a black kid. One was 
calling himself Jerry Quarry and the 
other was Jimmy Ellis and they were 
jabbing away at each other’s hands. 
It could have been nothing but a draw.

A little crowd had gathered around them and some were rooting for Jerry Quarry and some of them were rooting 
for Jimmy Ellis Their rooting got so 
hot that a small skirmish broke out
in the crowd and pretty soon three 
black kids and one white kid were on 
the ground laughing their heads off.

Right in back of them, a group of 
girls was looking on. One of them was named April and she was a chubby little fifth-grader with a long blonde braid and she was white. She said she didn’t like it because the black kids fight too much.

“That ain’t true,” one of the black girls said.

“It is too,” April yelled as she sent 
the black girl flying with a quick 
karate chop to the chest.

At the far end of the yard, on one of the basketball courts, a long semi-
set shot by one of the kids from Claghorn was just bouncing its way through the iron hoop when the buzzer went off.

Recess was over now and a school-
yard full of color-blind kids slowly made their way back into the building. Back to their heterogeneously-placed classes and the teachers who would tell them what a great world this would be if only people could learn to live together.

So back into the building they went, 
black and white together, to wait for the next recess when they could go 
outside and just be kids again. Waiting for the next recess when they could go outside and, for fifteen minutes in a concrete yard surrounded by a big cyclone fence, solve all the world’s problems.

Funny how kids start out with the answer and end up with the question.

BACK INSIDE, Ann Lichterman sits 
by her window, wearing the face that 
she keeps in a jar by the door. Ann 
Lichterman is the school’s guidance 
counselor and her nice little office 
with a view is filled with psychology 
books and potted plants. On the top shelf of the small bookcase across 
from her desk are two almost identical 
dolls. One has yellow hair and blue 
eyes and a peachy complexion. The other one has black frizzy hair and 
brown eyes and brown skin. The dolls make nice bookends.

Ann Lichterman was reading a note from a mother whose kid had been given some clothes to wear because the ones he had had been condemned. “Isn’t it heartbreaking? They don’t have all we take for granted,” she said piously.

She wiped a near-tear and went on. “The parents are so far away and it’s difficult to have communication with them. They are physically far away and it’s a long ride.

“We haven’t kept any hostility on race,” she said. “From the day a bused-in child enters this school, he is 
reminded constantly, ‘You are a Spruance child.’ ” (Many of the kids 
found this a bit hard to swallow. When asked what school they went to, most of them gave the name of their sending school. And the few who said Spruance, did so with some hesitation.)

“Busing has been going on for 
years, and will continue to go on,” 
she said.

THE POLICY OF the Board of Education states that a more extensive use of busing to foster integration is part of its current general plans. How long the busing will continue depends on how rapidly new schools
are built and antiquated buildings replaced. In an effort to determine what effects the program is having scholastically, the Board has put out an achievement study or two, filled with
means and medians and modes.

When you put it all together, though, the results are fairly inconclusive. Some kids have done better 
with the busing while others have 
stayed about the same. The Board is 
quick to point out, though, that no 
one, at either the sending or receiving 
schools, has suffered scholastically as 
a result of the program.

There is one major hitch in these 
findings. The latest study the Board 
has to offer is dated December 1966, 
and in those days the kids who were being bused were still pretty much 
from the cream of the sending school’s crop. Now that the selection is basically a random one, the situation quite possibly may have changed. The Board is now in the midst of giving it
another long, hard look.

Ann Lichterman says that children are not prejudiced and that any hostility among them on the issue of 
race comes from the family She spoke of the two black teachers among Spruance’s faculty of forty as a case
in point.

On parent visitation day in November, many of the Oxford Circle parents were a little shocked to find out that their kids had a black teacher. Somehow, it just hadn’t occurred to the kids to mention something as significant as color when talking about
their teacher.

On the subject of the faculty, Ann 
Lichterman noted that inexperience 
is the key factor in any difficulties in 
handling the bused-in kids. “If we 
know a child is a problem child, we 
will place him with an experienced 
teacher,” she said. “We’ll assign him 
to a teacher we feel can handle him.”

She doesn’t think that the black 
kids have any trouble reacting to 
white authority figures. “They respect 
people,” she said, “not for their color.”

JOE AGIN HAD JUST finished making 
one of his frequent tours of the build

ing. He visited the science rooms and 
the reading rooms and the classrooms. 
Everyone is used to Agin’s popping 
in, and things just go on as usual. It was late in the day now though, and you’d think even the teachers
would be getting sick of the brotherhood bit.

In one third-grade class, the teacher 
asked the kids what the most wonderful thing in the world was.

A white girl in the front row said 
”money.”

The question was repeated.

A black girl three rows back said 
”people.”

AGIN SMILED AS he closed the door 
and hustled down the hallway to the 
now vacant faculty dining room. There, he was to meet with Reba
Hoffman, his assistant, a matronly 
professional educator who keeps all 
her pencils sharpened.

In addition to being assistant to the 
principal, Reba Hoffman is in charge of the reading program at Spruance. She and Agin sat at separate tables and spoke of some more of their problems. One of the answers, Reba Hoffman feels, is to have smaller classes, 
to be able to show the kids that someone is interested in them, to form closer relationships and, hopefully, get through to them.

“Their home life affects them a lot,” 
she said. “In most cases, there is so 
much to be done—too much. And if 
the child is too far behind, we can 
only bring him up one or two levels. 
The earlier we get them, the more 
we can save,” she said, as outside, the 
heavens rumbled with thunder.

Reba Hoffman underscored the need for experienced teachers, and
the fact that getting them to work 
with underprivileged kids is difficult with the system’s policy of voluntary 
transfers, which doesn’t allow the placing of experienced teachers where they are most needed.

“As room becomes available here, the amount of busing to the Northeast will increase,” Agin said. “Because of overcrowding, ghetto schools
are always going to need relief.” Agin 
added that it is hard to get more Negro teachers to come to the Northeast, mostly because of distance from the neighborhoods where they live.

In many ways, Agin would like to 
see more Negro people and more 
Negro life brought into the school. He has gone so far as to set up a display right outside of the school 
library, including in it such books as 
”The Negro Heritage Library,” “Playtime in Africa,” and a variety of novels and biographies of the George Washington Carver-Booker T. Washington ilk.

But both he and Reba Hoffman agree that the kids at Spruance are really too young to relate to the teaching of Negro history.

“Maybe integration is not as important as it was first thought to be,” Agin said. “Maybe what we need is smaller classes and more quality education.”

THE DOOR OPENED NOW, as one of 
the school’s non-teaching assistants came in. And as the door opened, the room became flooded with the sounds from the auditorium, just across the way.

Agin got up and walked across the hall to see what was going on. It was 
an assembly of the sixth-grade graduating class, some of whom had taken more than six years to make it. Many of them were white and some of them were black.

At the podium was a woman named 
Mrs. Flinker, who, if she weren’t leading the meeting, would make a 
good dowager in an English drawing room comedy.

Mrs. Flinker was telling the kids 
some of the great things in store for 
them at graduation. Things like a banquet and a full-length feature movie, 
and more. And as she mentioned 
each of them, the kids cheered and shrieked with delight.

And after the last hurrah had died, Mrs. Flinker led them all in a song they would be singing at graduation. 
The song is called “Good Neighbor”
 and it comes from the Southwest and 
it’s all about extending a friendly hand
 to the people across the Rio Grande. The words go, “Show we belong to one big happy family; good, good neighbors that are free.”

And when they finished singing the 
song, Mrs. Flinker was nice enough to 
point out the moral. “But we can’t be 
good neighbors to our friends across 
the Rio Grande until we are good 
friends with each other, now can we 
boys and girls?” she asked.

The boys and girls agreed.

And so this month, on graduation day, they will all stand on the stage 
as one, black and white together, and 
they will sing “Good Neighbor” and other songs of friendship and brotherhood.

And when it is all over, they will 
say good-bye, and the white kids will 
get their hugs and their presents from 
parents and grandparents, and the black kids will all get on the bus and 
go back where they came from.

The system was skewed against Black Americans from the start, the Black community was given the bulk of the busing load to carry. So why aren’t more Blacks happy that busing has effectively been put down?

Not long ago (By Supreme Court Standards) in a school district, which happened to be Black, became frustrated by an integration plan which seemed to do little in the service of their community. So they fought it and won. Central High School in Louisville KY. was returned to a ‘neighborhood school’ by the slam of a gavel in Federal Court. The NAACP and every other organization that could get their picture in the paper applauded the effort and success. The only dissenter was the judge who saw the action as a “step backward”, but was compelled by legal maneuvering from the Black community(AKA the law suit brought against the Jefferson County School Board) to rule in their favor.

Fast forward to June 29, 2007 and another court has made a similar ruling, only this time the plaintiff was white and the court in question was the Supreme Court. Why did this case even go that far? Blacks were able to receive justice at the Federal Court level. The plaintiffs race seems to be the only distinguishable factor, both cases revolved around the school boards use of race in school assignment, both were tried by the same attorney, something seems a little strange. Anyway, now that the ruling has finally come down and people are upset?

I am confused, and worse yet I find myself in agreement with Louis Coleman. (Having typed that I may have to cut off my finger tips at a later date.) Coleman is the only person, who regularly speaks for the Black community locally, who has said it like it is. He feels, as do I, that the system has failed to produce any results more significant than a diverse classroom. The original goal was to improve education for ALL children within a district.

This original goal was doomed as soon as school’s began to institute “special” schools. You know them, they go by fancy titles like “Traditional Schools” or “Magnet Schools.” These schools allowed any white person with either enough money or enough political pull to vacate the busing scenario all together leaving behind poor whites and poor blacks to take hour long bus rides to schools.

Meanwhile the wealthy were sending their children to secretly segregated schools within the district, but they did have to provide their own transportation, at first. So the money which was supposed to flow into integrated schools and level the education received by all children, flowed instead to “special” schools, stunning isn’t it. Is it any wonder why the education system in America has been laying a big fat goose egg for the past thirty years?

The best part is that this program was designed to help Black students and so they where the ones required to be bussed for the majority of their school years. So who was even less interested in being at school? You guessed it, the kids who had to ride for an hour a day to get somewhere they didn’t want to go. A school far away from family, friends and community. The parents of these students where even worse off, if there was a meeting or school activity which required their attendance, they had to travel across town to attend. Do you think they stood in line to become PTA members of a school which required an expedition on their behalf to get to? Not very often, I’m willing willing to bet.

I really am stunned that the Black community is upset with the most recent court ruling regarding race and school assignment. The really stunning remarks are the ones that seem to have a sense of “surprise” to them.

This is the same ruling the Black community heard years ago and sang its praises.