Because parents choose to send their children to Healthy Start, a higher-than-usual degree of parental involvement can be expected. Parents voted to exclude sex education from classrooms. In addition to the E.D. Hirsch Core Knowledge curriculum, students study the three Rs as well as respect and responsibility through The Children's Book of Virtues and parent-approved Disney movies.
Other teachers express outrage and bewilderment at the fledgling campus's potential plight. "To say that they could close our doors down because we're not racially balanced is ridiculous," says Letisha Judd, a 26-year-old second-grade teacher. "As long as the school is performing and providing students with the education that they need, I don't know why we have to be racially balanced." She adds a simple fact: "We're open to the public. We cannot force people to bring their children here."
Indeed, Healthy Start has advertised in white neighborhood newspapers, posted flyers in white churches, and mailed literature to white homes. If white parents won't enroll their kids in a school in a tough, black neighborhood, Healthy Start can't force them.
Healthy Start's appeals have not gone totally unanswered, however. Christine Jonsdotter, 41, is the mother of Michael, one of Healthy Start's two white students. Although she and her husband live 15 minutes away in an affluent Raleigh community, they chose not to send their first grader to the local public elementary campus. "I didn't feel comfortable putting him in a large public school system," Jonsdotter tells me. "I wanted a smaller-school setting with more emphasis on character development, not just academics." She adds that at Healthy Start, "They teach manners. They teach kids to be kind to each other."
Jonsdotter says that in just four months at Healthy Start, Michael has overcome many of his reading difficulties. She is "totally appalled" that the school's racial makeup could place it in jeopardy. "There's been nothing but an outpouring of love from that school," she says. "When my kid walked in there, the kids ran up and hugged him."
Hugs, shmugs, say North Carolina's educrats. This sort of progress pales in comparison to the overwhelming blackness of some charter schools. "This wasn't supposed to happen," State Board of Education member Jane Norwood declared at a spring board meeting. "This is not the intent of having charter schools," she continued, waving overhead a sheet full of numbers on the racial makeup of charters. As Julius Chambers, a civil rights attorney and chancellor of North Carolina Central University, told the Greensboro News & Record: "I don't think we should be creating havens for black students or for white students."
E.S. Simpson, a former superintendent of the Johnson County Schools, wrote the Raleigh News and Observer in a near-panic: "Are charters being used to re-segregate the races? To segregate the poor from the rich? To establish a class system?"
Teachers union leader John Wilson sees all this as a matter of creeping Jim Crowism. Never mind that parents are free to send or not send their children to places like Healthy Start. "I think resegregation is wrong anywhere," he says. "If there are children of other ethnicities, then the school board should cause the makeup of schools to be reflective of that." And just what is Wilson's recipe for reflectivity? Busing, "both mandatory and voluntary." He helpfully adds: "Busing is not a bad word. It's a mechanism for creating a society of children that learn to work together."
Wilson says he and the North Carolina Association of Educators "will wait to see what good faith effort" the charters are making "to achieve racial parity....If we see they are not, we will check with our legal counsel to see if there is any action we can take on behalf of the taxpayers of North Carolina."
A state shutdown of Healthy Start and other "excessively black" charters "will happen over my cold, dead political body," says Kay Daly, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina Foundation for Individual Rights. Daly calls Healthy Start "the first lifeboat that came along. Now they are threatening to torpedo the lifeboat and send the kids back to the killing fields that are the Durham Public Schools."
The NCFIR plans to ask a federal judge to prevent North Carolina officials from closing charter schools under the state racial diversity mandate. Foundation attorney Jack Daly notes that "undiverse" public schools do not get padlocked; the racial rules apply only to charter schools. More important, NCFIR plans to argue that students should be treated equally as Americans under the Constitution's 14th Amendment rather than as components of racial categories.
Oddly enough, all this tumult revolves around a universe of just 4,600 students at 34 schools, reports the Spectator, a free weekly newspaper distributed in the Raleigh-Durham area. Thirty-one new charter schools could add an additional 7,500 students. Compare those 12,100 current and potential pupils to North Carolina's total enrollment of 1.7 million. The magnitude of the charter schools' threat to the status quo is remarkable given their modest size.
Critics predicted that establishing charters would encourage white flight from traditional public schools. That never occurred. Instead, blacks are fleeing the educational plantations for emancipated charter schools. Their success stories are highlighting the public schools' failure to educate their captive student bodies. It would be an especially bitter irony if the masters of the old system used the race card to keep black children shackled in ignorance.
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