By: Brenda Flanagan
Correspondent
“It’s racist, right? It’s racist!”
That’s how parent Sharon Smith characterizes the controversial One Newark plan that caused raucous rants and walkouts after the state-run district reorganized city schools, closed 13 and replaced them with charters and transferred kids from Newark’s mostly-minority, poverty-plagued South and West Wards to different schools across town.
“How can you think, in your white privilege, that it’s okay for this group of people who live in HUD housing that they may not have a car?” Smith asked.
She joined a group called PULSE: Parents Unified for Local School Education, who asked the federal government to investigate. The result? This November, Newark’s school district agreed to address the alleged discrimination, after the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights found “…the number of African-American students and students with disabilities affected by the school closings in the district effective at the end of the school year 2011-2012 was significantly disproportionate as compared to white and other students…”
Smith said, “It tells you there’s discrimination in that the majority of the black and brown children were not regarded in creating a plan that was supposed to be for them.”
Under the agreement, the state-controlled school district must submit data, showing the feds how kids impacted by One Newark; performed academically; what facilities they had available after they were transferred; how it affected their transportation; and whether kids with special needs received proper resources. If they find kids harmed by One Newark, the district must implement plans to fix the problem by April 30.
“I’m excited,” Johnnie Lattner, Pulse co-founder, said. “I think the community should be excited, but I think we need to do our part, too, to make sure they do their job.”
“We commend the federal government for stepping in, especially when you look at the outcome of the One Newark,” Newark Board of Education Vice-Chair Marques Lewis said. “in how you look at one section of the city where you could go from the beginning of the ward to the end of the ward in one part, and there’s no public schools available for them children to attend.”
The district had no comment, but former school board member and charter school advocate Shavar Jeffries says the schools that closed under One Newark had failed those kids.
“We had to do something different, and I’m glad we did something different. Those children now are better off because we did some things differently. The disparate racial effects really aren’t about the intervention, it’s about the harm that the intervention were trying to remedy,” Jeffries said.
For kids whose schools were closed, or who got shuffled around by the One Newark plan, this federal agreement is probably late in coming. But for a district that’s chafing to regain its autonomy, it’s validation.