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Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, my name is Genevieve Mitchell and I am the Executive Director of the Black Women's Center.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Congressman Martin R. Hoke of Ohio, your colleagues from Congress, and Joyce Haws of the National Association for Neighborhood Schools for providing me with the opportunity to speak at this forum today.
I am a resident of the City of Cleveland, candidate for the Cleveland Board of Education and most importantly a parent of three students of the Cleveland Public School system.
It is the latter of those three statements which warrants my comments today, and more specifically, the manner in which the desegregation initiative is adversely impacting the educational futures of Black children.
Under the aegis of this failed social experiment we have for 20 years witnessed the most maliscious mechanism ever put forth under the pretense of integration to ameliorate segregation. This mechanism, legally erected and politically mandated at the federal court level represents in my estimation, the most henious and politically invasive process ever initiated to undermine quality education for all children who utilize the public education system in urban communities nationwide.
In Cleveland, desegregation represents a 1 billion dollar taxpayer investment which has facilitated the exodus of over 80% of this cities families and children. It has facilitated the economic bankruptcy of this public school system, the curriculum deterioration of quality programs and services, imposed misery and profound hardship on the parents of the "most vunerable" of all victims, our children and has strategically destroyed any possibility of creating a fair and equitable education system.
Excluding perhaps, magnet programs, the overall depletion of teaching and support staff, competative academic programs & sports and extracurricular activities have been pared down to the barest minimums, while at the same time the transportation for profit agenda has exacerbated.
Black children's educational futures have essentially been prostituted and mortaged in the most henious manner and as a parent and a Black woman, I can no longer sit by and watch this, and do nothing.
Structurally, busing has destroyed good schools, obliterated effective parent involvement, and forced Black children to be bused out of their communities to predominantly Black schools.
It has placed parents in the ridiculous predicament of having to request "special transfer" to have our children sent to school "around the corner". It has facilitated the redistricting of neighborhood schools, enabling them to be usurped for magnet programs, where small groups of students are bused to what Jonothan Kozal, (author of 'Savage Inequalities') described as private schools, operating under the auspice of the public school system designed to deter the flight of parents who wished to circumvent court ordered busing. It has fostered a wicked kind of 'inner competative animosity by implementation of the 'school within a school concept' where "Brave New World" stratification methods are implemented. Some have attributed the brutal stabbing of young Paul Wallace at Mooney Jr. High to this practice.
The "busing nightmare" has left poor Black children walking long unnecessary distances to schools outside their neighborhoods, and facilitated repeated and unnecessary school reassignments to justify race ratios. Of course, with the overall depletion of white student enrollments, I'd imagine the busing proponents will have to resort to kidnapping white children to maintain the practice.
The Remedial Order as originally drafted was an assinine piece of legistlation which has done little more than enhance the very problems the original plaintiffs sought to ameliorate.
I am tired of being made to feel guilty by the progenitors of failed civil rights agendas, because of my determination that certain liberal social agendas are nothing more than a batch of 'federal fund pimping government anti-poverty agendas put forth by those individuals who have prostituted the masses of Black families under the aegis of a civil rights agenda that has serviced only the needs of special interest and non-authentic Black leadership.
The notion that social integration is the goal of every Black person in America, is erroneous. I just don't believe that the average Black person gets up in the morning thinking about integration.
I think that 'economic desegregation' is a focal point of the Black community. Economically desegregating opportunity is a serious approach. Desegregate the banks and the housing institutions. Desegregate the employment industry where racism is so pervasive.
I have said time and again, "bus the money, honey!"
I suggested at a prior hearing that if you absolutely must bus my children, please bus them to the Jewish schools, where they..."educate" children.
People often ask my feelings on vouchers and privatization. They wonder how would I as a potential Board member vote, to which I reiterate that "it matters not what I, or the Board or the teachers want or think, it is the question", "Shall the courts have the legal authority to supercede the rights of the parent by forcibly imposing a remedy that parents clearly, do not want?"
The parents have privatized this District by attrition.... they left! As a colleague of mine said, "They voted with their feet." The District, he continued, 'is apparently selling a product that no one wants to buy!" The parents have vetoed desegregation and that's the only thing that matters!
The other significant piece is that these children do not belong to the attorneys, the unions, the District, the state or the courts, they belong to the parents, they belong to us!
It clearly boils down to the rights of the parents which have been derided and usurped by those special interests who as some have stated, have been living large while sucking slop from the desegregation trough.
Some of the very individuals who don't want to free the slaves, would die and go to hell before they would place their own children in these inferior schools...
..... but,would sue the parents of the slaves to insure that our children are legally consigned to mediocrity. Who will you sue, the parents who don't think your 'fit' to educate their children?
Unless imperative measures are put in place that will abolish desegregation nationwide and address the issue of equitable and adequate funding as well as protecting parents' choice, the human infrastructure of this country will collapse.
The wealthy have had vouchers for a long time, it's called, ....cash money.
I also proposed the development of several busing magnet schools for the benefit of our "integration mad negroes" to help protect their civil rights, because my priority is education, not defined by the ederal Courts or the Civil Rights attorneys whose children attend marvelous private schools with income derived from my child's misery which they have so accomodatingly facilitated.
Most of the people making decisions about the manner and place in which our children will be educated, don't even live in Cleveland.
Yet they know so well what's best for us!
The Remedial Order clearly rtates that the Special "slave" Master shall insure that all Cleveland City Schools, "...meet and maintain State Minimum Standards." What an absolutely ludicrous objective to co-sign on. (Pg. 99, Remedial Order, Cite)
Over..30,000 parents signed petitions some years ago to have the practice abolished, it fell on deaf ears.
In our attempt to focus on unrealistic and punitive measures, we have strategically derided our primary objective to create a top notch education system for every child.
We have failed to look at the socloi-economic dynamics which have commensurately contributed to the deterioration of the family as an institution, perpetrated via economic and political racism which is structural and institutionalized, of which desegregation is one.
We have undertaken very 'silly' and 'superficial' approaches to very serious problems that are impacting the Black community.
We have, in the Black community been placed at a serious disadvan- tage because we have been censored, Black women's voices and solutions have been determined by those who, do not speak for us.
Black women have some important messages for this world, and our voices must be heard!
If it takes white men to facilitate that forum, then, so be it!
These are the children who have been referred to as... "fecal matter" (and you know what that is) locked in a political quagmire whose demise must be swift.
We, here in America, are warehousing Black and poor children in facilities that look worse than prisons. Then have the audacity to blame them for their own failure.
Columbus mayoral candidate, Bill Moss, talks candidly about the many dimension of desegregation as a failed social policy in his book, "School Desegregation: Enough is Enough, Dr. Anyim Palmer, spoke in Cleveland last January on the "Destruction of the Black Child Through Public Education" when the Black Women's Center posed the question, "Are the Public Schools Pimping Black Children?".
State Assemblywoman, Polly Annette Williams, spoke here in Cleveland at the invitation of Councilwoman Fannie Lewis, where she delineated the "busing nightmare and its detrimental impact on Black children yet the buses continue to roll.
Long bus rides, long waiting periods, and rides that have sometimes resulted in injury or death, is tonhigh a price for our children to pay. It is a means that fails to justify the end, and has caused great pain and suffering for too many parents and children.
If there were something significant and the end of that ride then perhaps, I'd feel somewhat different, but educating Black children has not, nor is it now the objective of this ruse.
We need comprehensive chances in the system. We need to build new neighborhood schools. We need to refurbish existing structures that are structurally sound. We need comprehensive sports and arts programs made available for every child in the system.
We also need, programs that are rooted in technologies of the future, so that we can create a globally competative work force.
We need enhanced parent involvement initiatives put in place that are functional, strong extracurricular activilies programs for all children, not merely a select few.
We need post secondary parent education initiatives developed and organized in conjunction with the various college and university programs and media networks to communicate the message that we are changing the paradigms that govern education to a total family focus.
We've got work to do.
Something is extremely wrong when the parent has to write the President of the United States to get their child on a schoolbus; when because of administrative ineptnesscod malfeasance the parent is subjected to the scrutiny of the truant officer and threatened with legal prosecution for defying a court order violated by the District!
My fear is that the next judicial remedy will be a mandate that by the year 2000, every white family in the State of Ohio must have at least one Black person living with them.
Although teetering on the absurd, it remains no more asurd then the comedy of horrors which have derailed public schools and destroyed the educational futures of generations of Black children while padding the pockets of special interest at our expense.
Judge Krupansky said that the Courts should have been out of this case 5 years ago, when will we be freed?
We seek...
-unitary status
-immediate relief from the Remedial Order
-adequate and equitable funding for all schools
-exploration of parent choice as a remedy and restitution
-parents rights constitutionally protected to insure that they cannot be usurped by courts, attorneys and special interests.
-academic and financial restitution to the victims of this nightmare
-autonomy, neighorhood schools and community control.
-validating home schools, independent schools, parochial, private and community schools as viable options constitutionally protected by right of the parent and able to be funded.
-community monitoring boards to address oversight
-more diverse representation of community constituents on local school boards with decision making power over budgets and allocations, hiring decisions, accountability.
MAY DESEGREGATION BE SWIFTLY AND COMPLETELY ABOLISHED, FOREVER!!!
Thank you for your time.
Genevieve Mitchell