League of  Women Voters of the Lower Cape Fear

Statement on School Redistricting    

 

On behalf of women voters of Brunswick, New Hanover, Pender and Onslow Counties, the League of Women Voters of the Lower Cape Fear issued the following statement for the benefit of the New Hanover County Board of Education regarding School Redistricting, May, 2006.

 

The League of Women Voters is committed, nationally, statewide and locally to racial integration of schools as a necessary condition for equal access to education.

Therefore, we support the redistricting plan for New Hanover County which allows the most diversity. Robert Lowe, Historian and author of Rethinking Schools, has said, “A policy of returning education to local schools suggests historical amnesia about both neighborhood schools and busing, and threatens to increase racial inequality in education...The current nationwide effort to restore neighborhood schools has little basis for promising excellent schools, but it can and will deliver racially separate ones.”

Redistricting of schools is always painful, moving is difficult, and most do not want to change schools. Our system has been in serious need of balancing our schools for more than ten years, but no School Board so far has been willing to bite the bullet and move in the direction of equality. We hope you will be willing, secure as you are with the results of the recent elections, to do just that.

Allowing unequal schools with disparate economic populations also allows for unequal funds, most importantly because the parents supporting the schools have such different amounts to contribute. If we compare the relative PTA funds available to our elementary schools now, above and beyond tax money, differences are striking. The difference in contributions does not mean that parents in the schools which serve lower economic groups care less, simply that they have less time and resources to give. Being nearer the school, in the neighborhood, will not change that. All children, rich or poor, minority or majority, deserve a quality education.

Our system should not continue to discriminate under the name of “neighborhood schools” as though that means some sort of community. What that DOES mean is creating groups of children who have limited exposure to others, and that is not the best education. Education should include exposure to as many different people as possible, even when differences are confusing. We have little chance of understanding if we are never exposed.

The League supports diversity for quality education, and we urge you to adopt the plan that will provide diversity for the greatest number of our children, of whatever race. The public schools should do no less.

To quote Dr. Lowe again: “Unless a return to neighborhood schools includes control by the neighborhood and guarantees adequate resources, it threatens to create institutions that are worse than those of the pre-Brown South. It would reproduce the separate but unequally funded schools of the Jim Crow era without providing the community-connected, all-Black staffs who so frequently committed themselves to developing the students’ ‘highest potential.’”

As our National League position states, “The kind of housing desegregation that would make school desegregation natural and easy STILL does not exist, and Federal enforcement has decreased.” While you may enjoy the lack of Federal supervision, we ask that you now do the right thing just because it is right. 

 

For additional information contact, Audrey Albrecht, President of League of Women Voters of The Lower Cape Fear at  (910) 799-0309, draalbrecht@bellsouth.net, or go to http://www.bettergov.nc.lwvnet.org.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carolina Civic Voice

                             Summer 2006  Vol.  6, No 2