Is The Orange County School Board Causing Schools To Fail?
- Details
- Category: Education
- Published: Monday, 11 March 2013 15:20
- Written by Lawrence A. Robinson
The Orange County School Board continues to do more damage to students than good. Their policies and practices seem to have little to do with educating our youth and more to do with appearance and the transference of large sums of money. They appear to do the work of the state's educational system, but largely they move huge sums of money away from poor areas and into the more affluent areas of the county.
The Orange County School Board would like for the Orange County residents to believe that there is no money to maintain all of the schools and therefore some facilities must close or combine in order to save money. So they voted to close predominately Black Richmond Heights Elementary School while at the same time giving Dr. Phillips High School a 50 million dollar bonus.
They want you to believe that the reason enrollment in predominately Black schools is low because those students want to go to other schools and so they transfer out. The fact is Jones High School is at half capacity and most predominately Black schools in Orange County are way under capacity. The school board won't tell you that the school's populations are low because of zoning. The school board zoning program, forces students to be bused from Black areas to other areas 10 or 15 miles away. Some elementary school students are bused 15 miles to schools out of their area when they are within walking distance of a local school. When they finally get to school they are tired. These students get up earlier and then ride the bus for another hour before even starting their school day. Yet the school board blames these children for not being as alert as other kids.
The school board wants you to believe that the parents don't care about the student or else, they would come to PTA meetings and participate in other school functions. The school board keeps quiet the facts that these kids go to a school 15 miles away and the parents have a hard time going to a PTA meeting so far away after working hard all day. This is an unfair inconvenience for these parents. This is an unnecessary burden placed on Black parents by the Orange County School Board.
The school board won't tell you that each student is worth over $6,000 a year in state funds, and about half is given to the school where the student attends. This means that the school board is transferring millions of dollars out of the Black community and into other communities. This also means that the schools and communities where students are zoned away from, become poorer and the schools where the students are zoned into become wealthier. The entire neighborhood feels this effect. The wealthier schools obviously will have more teachers, more tutors, more student activities, more class electives, more everything educational. The poorer schools will obviously have less of these needed features and therefore the public perceives that the students are dumb, the teachers are failures and those neighborhoods should be bulldozed. So these poorer schools receive a failing grade and the school board can now close the school because of low enrollment, poor neighborhoods and parents that don't care.
These false issues are all created, approved and generated by the Orange County School Board and they can be corrected by the school board. However, the school board doesn't want to correct these problems, they want to control the money flow. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars being managed and transferred by the Orange County School Board. Transferred out of Black communities into other communities. The Black neighborhoods continue to lose because the powers that be turn their heads and pretend there is nothing they can do.
The Orange County School Board doesn't care about the students, teachers, parents or the community in which they are suppose to serve. The policies and practicies of the Orange County School Board as they relate to poorer areas, is one reason that our community is failing. The Orange County School Board is THE reason that our schools are failing.