http://thinkprogress.org/2005/09/14/katrina-excuse/

And this comes 50+ years after the Brown decision! I simply can't believe this is my country!!!!

Here's the WSJ article (it's free today):

Separate but Equal? Schooling
Of Evacuees Provokes Debate

By DANIEL GOLDEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 14, 2005; Page B1

The 372,000 schoolchildren displaced by Hurricane Katrina are stirring an old debate about whether separate education can really be equal.

A number of states, including Utah and Texas, want to teach some of the dispersed Gulf Coast students in shelters instead of in local public schools, a stance supported by the Bush administration and some private education providers. But advocates for homeless families and civil rights oppose that approach.

At the center of the dispute is whether the McKinney-Vento Act, a landmark federal law banning educational segregation of homeless children, should apply to the evacuees. In addition, because many of the stranded students are black, holding classes for them at military bases, convention centers or other emergency housing sites could run afoul of racial desegregation plans still operating in some school districts.

Separate education for the evacuees is "unconscionable," says Barbara Duffield, policy director for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. "Many states have worked extremely hard to comply with the law and give these kids a regular school experience. The federal Department of Education is seeking to undermine the law at a time when it is most needed."

But officials of some states contend that separate classes would be less disruptive to both school districts and displaced families. U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is expected to ask Congress soon for authority to waive McKinney-Vento and other key education legislation, such as the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, which holds districts and schools accountable for test scores of students in each racial group. Without a waiver, the penalty for violating McKinney-Vento is to deny states the funding they receive under the act for homeless education. Although the act was enacted in 1987, the desegregation requirement was adopted in 1994 and strengthened in 2001.

Susan Aspey, an Education Department spokeswoman, said that "we still don't know" how broad a waiver the secretary will seek and that the secretary plans to be "prudent" in exercising the waiver authority. She also said the department doesn't know how many children have re-enrolled in public schools, how many are being educated separately and how many are awaiting placement. Since it's unclear how long the children will be displaced, she added, the secretary won't be granting waivers "in perpetuity."

Businesses from charter schools to distance-education providers are already pressing for permission to teach the homeless in shelters and other makeshift housing, hoping to gain broader acceptance for their approaches to education. Mark Thimmig, chief executive of White Hat Ventures LLC, which educates nearly 5,000 students in Pennsylvania and Ohio via the Internet, said last week that his company would be eager to educate displaced students in the Astrodome.

After nearly 600 evacuees landed at Camp Williams, a National Guard training center in Utah, officials at the neighboring Jordan school district were ready to bus the children to school. The district, which is 1% black, has more than 75,000 students, including 1,800 homeless pupils.

But Pamela Atkinson, a special consultant to Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., had other ideas. The displaced families had experienced "so much trauma, anxiety and separation" that the parents "wanted their children close by," said Ms. Atkinson. "Since we had classrooms at Camp Williams, it made more sense to keep them there."

She contacted Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, who then asked Secretary Spellings to seek to waive McKinney-Vento. "These displaced and homeless children are not the typical homeless children," Sen. Hatch wrote. "Nearly all of them are with their families. It is important to keep families together as the Katrina victims receive aid and support." The secretary had already made a verbal commitment to Sen. Hatch that she would not enforce McKinney-Vento, according to the letter.

Now, while many families have moved off Camp Williams, about 20 displaced children in kindergarten through 12th grade are studying art, reading and other subjects in classrooms on the base. The state brought in two black educators to advise district teachers on "cultural sensitivity," Ms. Atkinson said. "As long as there's one child at Camp Williams, we will continue to hold that school."

Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley, noting that 25,000 evacuees are housed at a closed Air Force base in San Antonio, asked the federal Education Department last week for "flexibility" to serve students "at facilities where they are housed, or otherwise separate from Texas residents during the 2005-2006 school year." U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, introduced legislation Monday that would grant Secretary Spellings authority to waive McKinney-Vento.

Such proposals are arousing consternation among advocates for the homeless, who fear that nearly two decades of gains in public-school enrollment for homeless children will be wiped out. They note that the act, which also requires school systems to enroll homeless children even without documentation such as health and residency records and to employ liaisons to the homeless, was vital to the swift, open-armed response of school districts to the student influx in the hurricane's aftermath. Also, they say, thousands of storm-battered children have already enrolled in public schools across the country without ill effects.

Gary Orfield, director of a Harvard University project that monitors school integration, said that segregating a predominantly black group of evacuees could raise "constitutional questions of racial discrimination." He also said that because many of them may be traumatized, have learning deficits, or come from failing schools, it would be "terrifically difficult" to teach a separate class of the displaced students, and that placing them in middle-class schools and communities would benefit them educationally.

William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizen's Commission on Civil Rights, said the administration's plans to ease McKinney-Vento and No Child Left Behind could leave the displaced students warehoused and forgotten. "We need some focus on the needs of the children, and not go around waiving a lot of regulations without deciding whether there's a need," Mr. Taylor said.

Not all states are seeking waivers. Mississippi officials turned down a proposal from a Navy base to hold classes there. Nikisha Ware, a Mississippi Department of Education official, said the law had helped evacuees to enroll in schools without red tape. "If there were no McKinney-Vento," she said, the hurricane "would have created it."

Write to Daniel Golden at dan.golden@wsj.com

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB...=public_home_us


I can. It makes me physically ill.

I cannot believe this mine either.
America the UGLY again.

Maybe if the kids who live in the area, were taught a little COMPASSION they would understand what a NATIONAL TRAGEDY this was and in their lives, they will grow up to not be racists like their parents, and to love all people.

Maybe going to school side by side would be beneficial to everyone.

leave it to George W. Bush. I am sick to my stomach hearing this.



When is this crap going to ever stop? WHEN???

URGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

There was an educational lawyer on here once.... he replied to my post about creating a forum for disability issues.... This is perfect for him.... anybody know who this is? Maybe his firm would be able to file a suit for these kids?

If we had followed the law and started integrating communities when segregation was outlaw instead of engaging in white flight we wouldn't be having this problem now. Although I live in a small county, there are seven school systems in the county
and almost all of the county residents who are Black are in one of the schools.
Sure, puting the displaced children from NO in all white scools will be disruptive for a period of time. So what? We should integrated the schools a long time
ago and this would not have been such a cultural schock. My sister-in-law got
4 Black students in her previously all-white, middle-class room and it has been
traumatic. The first couple of days the two black boys went arround telling the
little girls, "I wanta f**ck you" and it got back to one cute little blonde's Father
that one of the boys put his arm arround her shoulders and said, "I want you to be my bitch" and he told the Principal that if it happened again he was bringing his
gun to school and shoot the little _____. My sister-in-law says they are beginning to settle in and that if she doesn't have a nervous break down she thinks it will be ok in a few weeks.

Margaret Spellings is the same person who thinks Buster the Bunny should be banned for associating with gay people on PBS. Sadly, I'm not suprised that this is coming from her.

I am not white as some of you know. The law is to desegragate, so this goes against the settled law of the land. However, there MAY be wisdom in segragation IF the facilities were indeed equal. There is still much racism in America, and the Black Culture still needs healing, as the White culture needs evolvement.

I don't trust Bush as you know, but this may not be evidence of racism on his part, but looking for the least disruptive way to weave these children back into the educational system. This MAY be best for these children at this time.

I think so. We had a big gang fight at one of the local schools here in Houston yesterday and some kids were hurt. Local kids started a turf war with some evacuee kids over who was going to "run" the school. Here in particular, there are some pretty rough schools in the inner city. HISD has it's own police department if that tells you anything. We have 4 million people here so it's not unlike what you would find in any big city. These evacuee kids are not in a space to have to deal with that kind of social pecking order crap, while their lives are still unsettled at least for a while. The schools have proclaimed zero tolerance, but you know there are always going to be some who don't care if they get in trouble.

What Katrina exposed is not just in the Gulf Region any more than the inhumanity
of extreme religious fundamentalism is just in the Middle East. There is no gain without some risk. The greater risk is to allow the persons we have put in
leadership positions to sweep the problem back under the rug. It is time to help the bullies to exorcise their demons. It is not as though we don't all have them.
Let's all try to get more familiar with our own demons so we can be more helpful
to those who are having trouble keeping theirs in control.

TROU: But what Thurgood Marshall agrued in Brown was that separate was inherently unequal, so there is simply no way to achieve equality under this racist plan. There is no way to provide these young Americans with the SAME educational experiences of their more affluent, white counterparts unless they are at the SAME school. Separate but equal does not exist. And I find it despicable that they are using the argument that kids want to "be near family" when the reality is that some schools just don't want an influx of different children ruining their schools, communities, and soccer teams.

It would be one thing to argue that we don't want children exposed to violent schools, and so this is a safety issue (though I could point to a million flaws in that argument too), but that's not what this is about. This is about a few, predominantly white communities quaking with fear that their schools will become ghetto-ized. Though these same communities never seem to have a problem knowing that "other people's children" are educated in sorry-assed, violent schools. I see a journal article for me taking shape.

I just went to a meeting yesterday on how to enforce the McKinney-Vento act in my school district. I'm the liason on my campus. We've got 15 evacuee students at my elementary, about 400 in our district.
We had to remind our superintendent of this law when he was going to put all the evacuee kids on one campus. This law protects, not just evacuees, but all homeless students, including students who are living in crisis shelters due to domestic violence, etc. It says that the school district has to provide busing from wherever the student is to their school of origin. We've even bused across local district lines since the shelters here fill up and we overflow into a neighboring community.

The bottom line is that this is one of the GOOD things that has come from No Child Left Behind. Our district is adapting, but we are a very large district (we serve Ft. Hood and surrounding towns).

Spelling is the same one, though, that wants mentally retarded and severely disabled students to pass the same rigorous state exams as the general education student. Go figure!

Everything you are saying has truth in it hughesfan. However, this is a special case where disruption HAS to be considered just due to the scale of the displacement that has occured. The amount of children that need to be absorbed into existing schools all at once, will have a major impact on the children already in those schools.

The least disruptive way should be considered for both groups of children. I agree that some parents in those school districts are reacting from base levels of character, but not all. Also this should be done only on a temporary basis, if it is done, as the situation stabilizes.

I would have to agree. As an educator, our schools must accept an support ANY student that walks through the door and do our best for them. Besides, our school system is routinely "flooded" with one group or another. Immigration trends come to mind. The difficulty is more that adjustments to teaching strategies and approaches must be made. Those unfamiliar in dealing with poverty or students of diversity are often afraid because they feel unprepared for dealing with the complexity of the issues involved.

In our area, the Oakland "gentrification" has displaced a large number of African American families into our communities. The families my husband teaches are more fortunate than the Katrina families as they are able to move into the some of the nicer, new neighborhoods (in this case these are those who were able to SELL their property to developers). Unfortunately, the school system in the area was underprepared and now there are serious misunderstandings and acusations on both sides. With a primarily white middle class teaching staff, there have been issues around hiring a more diverse staff. But where to find them? Frequently, they aren't even available at education fairs....or in the college programs preparing teachers. So the school system is working towards building a bridge towards its new clients, but one that is shaky right now. But they are trying...

Having said this, I still say that the Katrina kids deserve a regular education in their (current) neighborhood schools: The LEAST RESTRICTIVE ENVIRONMENT!!! Schools and teachers have a responsibility to creating safe environments for all the students within their attendance area. Lets just do it! And do the best we can!

Evelyn, thanks for telling us about your experience and feelings on this, as someone intimately involved.

Do you think there is a danger of impacting other homeless kids if exceptions are made to the M-V Act for children made homeless by Katrina?

I only glanced at the topic but I think I get the jist. IMHO the mainly black evacuees would be better off staying together in their communities that are being formed from the victims of Katrina.
Also, it is not racism I think to say that the white, or mixed schools that already have formed their cliques etc. would be better served not being disrupted (that is not intended to reflect on the black children but on any changes) by the hurricane, which has already caused enough damage.

I see your point, but it's easy to assume that the change will ultimately be bad, when in fact, given the right school leader and school culture, change is not seen as a "disruption" at all, but an opportunity to learn from others while sharing your lives with them. Given the right community mind-set, these young victims could feel a flood of warmth and acceptance, instead of hostility. It makes no sense to crowd hoards of new students into one school in one community. I think that is what makes folks nervous, and it also is troubling to see many evacuees being bused directly to new "hoods" throughout the country, so they still end up attending troubled schools. I could be wrong, but I doubt Beverly Hills High has any new students from New Orleans--or perhaps one or two, but there are certainly areas for shelters in that community. There is one local district here in the Kansas City area that is predominantly white that has made it clear they don't want any new kids from N.O., so the majority of children new in town will attend the Kansas City Missouri School District, which has struggled to attain accreditation. Right now, the strategy for the dispersing of children is what is problematic, and would certainly lead to communities wondering if they can handle so many new students. I submit that if children were more widely dispersed--into every community--including affluent ones--then no one school or district would have to contend with such a challenge. The point I'm trying to make is that these children did not ask to be displaced, and they are not asking for anything more than this country is supposed to provide to every child--a safe learning environment that will help prepare them to be their best selves. Quality teaching and quality schools. It sickens me to think that some folks who are supposed to be educators just don't get that.