Posted on 09/05/2007 7:02:39 AM PDT by pabianice
The Robinsons, Dorchester: “I went to primarily white schools growing up,” Cathy Richmond Robinson says. “I think, ‘I did it, my kids can do it.’ Definitely by middle school, we’ll be moving out one way or another.” ( Stephen Michener is a man with a plan. He hands it to me as we sit on the couch in his second-floor Jamaica Plain condo – a slim white binder with the words Boston Metro Evac handwritten with a Sharpie on the spine. Following that, in parentheses, is written simply: (Plan B). "We started putting this together two years ago," he says. "We're still adding to it."
The binder is already an impressive blueprint for someone wanting to leave Boston in a hurry. An architect with close-cropped hair and black Prada glasses, Michener has put the same care into this project as he might into a gut-rehab. Tabbed sections hold notes on work necessary to sell his house, color-coded maps of Brookline that mark locations of playgrounds, bus routes, and school districts, and printouts of current homes on the market there.
"With Brookline, at least we could keep the same kind of lifestyle," he explains. "If we go out any farther than that, we might as well go to Ohio." Michener and his wife, Deb, have built a comfortable life in Boston over the last decade. Through the window I can see the ball field that abuts the condo's small side yard. Each morning, Deb walks downhill to take the subway to the city center to a landscape architecture firm, while Michener bikes to the Montessori school with his sons, Nate, 5, and Jacob, 2, before heading to his nearby office.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
In another article today we learn that the Lawrence, MA, public schools (a santuary city for illegal aliens) has mandated color-coded uniforms to better inform teachers and administrators who the most violent and most stupid students are. Ah, Liberalism!
Thanks for posting this, I read this article in the Sunday Globe. This line is a killer:
“If we go out any farther than that, we might as well go to Ohio.”
They get what they deserve.
Do any of the schools use brown shirts in their uniforms yet?
CNN was talking about tax cuts!
The real "war on the middle class" is represented by school busing.
CNN was talking about tax cuts!
The real "war on the middle class" is represented by school busing.
Good. MA and its socialism deserves to die a trickling, slow death . . .
Romney was the MA Governor. I guess he didn’t do enough to change things. Let’s make him President so he won’t do enough to change things on a national level as well.
Ah yes, from the Boston folk who brought you moral outrage over the South!
http://www.teachersdomain.org/resources/iml04/soc/ush/civil/boston/index.html
...On June 21, 1974, Massachusetts Federal Court Judge Arthur Garrity ruled that the Boston School Committee “intentionally brought about and maintained racial segregation.” His ruling was based on school committee records that documented ongoing resistance to desegregating schools when the school committee alone had the power to decide who went to any given school. In the two years leading up to the ruling, protests and demonstrations revealed white resistance and racial tension in a city that had long considered race a southern issue.
Garrity ordered the desegregation of the schools by the following September. His ruling meant that thousands of white students would be bused to schools in black communities, and black students would be bused to white schools, some in hostile communities such as South Boston and Charlestown.
When school began in September 1974, most schools quietly complied with the new plan. But in South Boston, buses carrying black children were greeted by angry, violent mobs that threw rocks through the windows. Nine young black students were injured. Roxbury community center leader Ellen Jackson remembers, “The kids were crying. They had glass in their hair. They were scared... they wanted to go home.
Black parents organized escorts to see their children to school safely. The following year, the busing plan was revised. But the violence against Boston’s black community continued, particularly in Charlestown and South Boston. Many white families boycotted the schools.
Boston’s busing plan continued indefinitely. Eventually, the violence subsided as some white families complied, while others enrolled their children in private schools or moved out of the city altogether into predominantly white suburbs...
This is a surprise only to “progressives” and other fools allowed to “run” our country (into the ground)...
I think the liberal mentality is deeply ingrained in Massachsetts that no one (even a theoretical Governor Tancredo) could do much to alter it.
“If we go out any farther than that, we might as well go to Ohio.”
As a Massachusetts suburbanite, all I can say is ‘Ohio’ is infinitely better than any variety of urban h*ll - and that includes Brookline.
A friend my wife knew in high school who turned gay moved to Boston to get OUT of Ohio. Nuff said.
SSDD.
When I was growing up in South Lawrence I attended what was then the Breen School. All the teachers were Irish Catholic spinsters and their calling was to teach. They did it as if their students lives depended on it and they disciplined us as if our lives depended on it. The principal and our parents stood behind them; you had no choice but to learn and be courteous.
I think the liberal mentality is deeply ingrained in Massachsetts that no one (even a theoretical Governor Tancredo) could do much to alter it.
__________________________________________
It would take a great leader to make a dent in the liberal group think in Mass as a Governor. Someone persuasive, committed, politically astute . . .
Boston ranks sixth from the bottom of the hundred largest American cities in its percentage of children, with just 19.8 percent of its population under 18 in 2000, down more than 10 percent from its high point of 31.9 percent in 1970. While accurate population figures since 2000 are unavailable, school enrollment in Boston has fallen 6 percent in that time, from 84,720 to 80,161. That outpaces a decline in the birthrate, suggesting families are continuing to move away. Unlike in previous decades, now the exodus is often not by choice...The Boston Foundation, in which about half of Boston parents said they were "somewhat or very likely" to leave in the next five years, despite the fact that two-thirds of those surveyed had lived in the city a decade or more. Ask any young urban parent, and you'll get an earful on why: skyrocketing housing prices, lackluster city schools, and a rising rate of violence.
This is our future run by the liberal and wealthy elites who are breeding themselves out of existence. They are living in a bubble.
Gee, now where does that sound like...?
Ah, those 'Rat run Utopias...
San Francisco becomes a city of empty nesters
Let's hear it for the blue bits, the heart and soul of America!
Snort.
The question of diversity cuts both ways for parents. White parents may live in Boston because they want their children to feel comfortable with all races, but many will say privately that they feel like a minority in the public schools, which are only 14 percent white.
The families who have stayed are, on average, poorer, less likely to be white, and more likely to be immigrants than those of a decade ago. (Indeed, if it weren't for the large rise in immigrant Latino families primarily in East Boston, the city would probably have seen more of a decrease in children and families.) These trends are not unique to Boston – cities all over the country, including San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., have seen similar dips.
Boston's failure is thus purely a matter of policy and cannot be blamed on demographics or income.
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