Monday, September 19, 2005

Seperate Schools for Katrina Students?

I think this is a seriously silly kerfluffle over managing schools & students. Let's look at it this way, we have thousands of people in shelters. Their kids need to go to school. We all agree on these two facts. Now things get entertaining. First off, they're technically homeless (far too many are in fact, but some are only in terms of time), therefor a federal law that prevents discrimination against homeless people comes into play. So, they can't be segregated or marked in any way. But, they still have to go to school. So, the school system has to look at how it handles this. It can bus them all over town, from all over town, in order to distribute them accordingly. In doing this though, it can't mark these students so they get back to the correct shelter. That would be bad. Oh, and lots of people don't want to be bused, that smacks of mistreatement and the poor kids can't go to their local school. Of course the local school can't stack chairs in classrooms, so there's only so many they can take, but opening a school, say next to a shelter, in order to give the kids there an education locally would be artificially segregating them... Gods in the heavens, is it more important that these kids go to school or that narrow little rules that really don't apply to this situation get in the way. What is wrong with starting another school to which all these new students can attend. Let's put it this way, if, instead of one week, a school system had this kind of growth over a couple of years. Wouldn't they bus the kids where they needed to go and/or build a new school near the new neighborhood? That's sure what they're doing in our town, but it doesn't seem to be because of segregation, but because, oh, I don't know, they have to manage their resources maybe... Just a thought.

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