The Destruction of the New South

Well, I quite enjoyed Raleigh Gawkers assessment of the situation, but I really thought I needed to add my own voice to the fray. As many of you know, The Raleigh school board has been taken over by people who decided that our busing program needs to be scrapped. To me, this move is nothing short of a racist, classist attempt by these parents to keep certain people out of "their" schools. In the New York Times today ,  they focus on the fact that Raleigh was once a leader in creating a kind of model for desegregation that if reversed could easily spiral out of control to the point of resegregation.

It seems like we were looking the other way and a small group of privileged white parents have hijacked the school board and are trying to push us back into pre-1976 era Raleigh public schools when there were two school districts.  One, the Wake County  was largely white and more wealthy, while the Raleigh City Schools was largely poor inner city minorities.  This push to de-integrate (because that's what this is) the schools will push our school districts back in that direction.  Access to resources will once again be limited for those in lower economic brackets as they were before the busing program which deny opportunities for those students.  As the New York Times article points out, this de-integration has already been done in Charlotte with disastrous results for those students.  We do not want to continue down this path, because what lies ahead can only be worse for the citizens an children of our city.