Posted on 05/03/2019 7:12:07 AM PDT by C19fan
A black high school graduate is suing her Mississippi school district because she claims she lost out on a college scholarship after a white male student with a lower GPA was named salutatorian instead of her.
Olecia James, 18, filed the federal lawsuit against the Cleveland School District last week.
The teenager claims that district officials took away the chance of her being salutatorian - the graduate with the second-best grades - of Cleveland Central High School because they 'feared white flight'.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
That superintendant was a person of character, that’s for sure.
This ping list is for the other articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
“The teenager claims that district officials took away the chance of her being salutatorian - the graduate with the second-best grades - of Cleveland Central High School because they ‘feared white flight’.”
If true...she should win big.
On a personal note...attractive young lady.
My advice to the young lady would be to drop the matter, be gracious, and determine to work harder than others to reach the top. Which a black female with a degree can certainly do today, even in Mississippi.
Alcorn is actually a bucolic campus and has many historical buildings
The huge cast iron stairs that survived Windsor Plantation after the fire found a second life there at the Oakland chapel.
A fair number of notables have graduated from there.
It’s biggest drawback is it’s fairly remote.
It should be noted up until post WWII most colleges up north were not open to blacks either
I tell WBill Jr that "it builds character", whenever he whines about something. I may steal your idea, just to toss a changeup occasionally.
Multiple classes each day for three years — we could choose our electives, I chose Physics, Meteorology, Chemistry, Applied Physical Science and the like rather than ‘ART’ or ‘basket weaving.’
What happened was they recalculated her GPA based on the classes she took at her prior high school which dropped her final GPA to .01 below his.
The real question is whether they can justify that recalculation.
One of our high school counselors taught the one geometry class as well. He wouldn’t give a grade higher than A-. It was just a personal peeve of his. Two girls in our class avoided this class while another guy took the class and received a B+. They ended up being co-valedictorians and he salutatorian. I didn’t care about grades, but it was an object lesson into trying to avoid letting my personal peeves harm other people. That has been over 40 years ago and I still think the teacher was a ****. He was a short, balding guy in his mid-30’s who wasn’t married, so he likely didn’t have much to look forward to.
I saw this when I was in high school as well—40 years ago. The offspring of local leaders and school officials were being held up as exemplars, though everyone knew many of them were involved in the same activities as the “bad kids.” However, I don’t recall any of them getting scholarships, since those easy grades they got from teachers didn’t help them on the ACT.
College proved to be the great equalizer. Because I made an effort only in classes I cared about, my academic rank was barely in the top third of my class. I went to a school in Arkansas that offered in-state tuition rates to students from Missouri counties that bordered the “Land of Opportunity,” as it was called in those days. My mother passed away five months before graduation, so I went to college on my social security survivor’s benefits and what I earned from part-time jobs. The school we attended would never be classified as the “Harvard of Arkansas,” but it offered a solid education.
Eight of us began as freshmen in the fall of 1976; four years later, only two of us graduated. The rest dropped out, discovering that their hometown social status and favors from the public school system didn’t help them a bit at the college level. My “turnaround” was motivated by a couple of factors. First, I began to understand that what I was doing would have a major impact on my life. And secondly, I was competing on what appeared to be a more level playing field. No one cared where I was from, or who my parents were. Do the work, and get the grade. Rest on your high school laurels and flunk out. It was that simple back then. Now, you probably need to be a gender studies major and Antifa activist to get decent grades.
Yes, probably. LOL
I miss Aretha, I’m from Chicago and loved her in The Blues Brothers.
“Multiple classes each day for three years”
If that’s the way we count high school years, then I must have been in HS for 100 years.
On topic, our daughter had epilepsy as a young girl; she had the kind that you grow out of at puberty.
So she worked really hard on her grades when she was in Primary School. Every night my husband will go down and work with her on the chalkboard in the basement. Because he was French and she went to a French School. But all that work has paid off. She was accepted at McGill but turned that down for another good school it has a good program in her field.
But believe me, when she turned down McGill, I was practically in tears, begging her to go. I kept telling her, people recognize that name even in the states. But she had different ideas and sometimes you got to just forget about it and let go. I think she’s done pretty well anyway. As for the grading oh, they have a different system it’s numbers not letters. She has brought her numbers up. It’s just a question of hard work.
Engineers solve problems. Very true. When my daughter was little she told me that when she grew up she wanted to be either a cashier or doctor LOL. After one summer working as a cashier she changed her mind pretty quick on that job.
If she was at the top and then they chose to recalculate with new rules, that is wrong. Knowing the area a bit, I bet she has a very strong case, but the school will circle the wagons and come up with excuses to back up their racism, or whatever the reason was that led them to diss her. Personally, I cheer her on to hopefully win her case if it is warranted as I am disinclined to believe school administrators in cases like this. We’ve had our own run-ins with my kids school administrators, and let’s just say that my respect for them is about as low as I would have for a member of Congress.
I ran into this in high school and college. It makes no sense to cap a grade, it’s a disincentive.
Another thing that ticked me off was a professor who had this thing about docking people who don’t show for the last class before finals one letter grade. She told my class we weren’t meeting again, she told the other class they were.
We argued that she misinformed us but she didn’t care because ONE PERSON from my class showed up. He had missed the prior class so didn’t know what she told us. You’d think in the face of an entire class, save one, not showing she would realize something was off but no, she lowered our grades anyway and blamed us for not getting it right.
She was a NY liberal.
The story obviously fails to give enough of the relevant background. That said, my quick first reaction is that if there was a combination of two schools with significantly different academic profiles … a wise administration might have chosen to go with co-valedictorians and salutatorians for a year or two.
Yes, that would be a bit awkward since the emphasis in a newly realigned school would have been on building a common identity. But if one school was far more rigorous academically than the other -- a fact that would be known to all the students and that would have been apparent in every class in the new school -- an accommodation would be in order. Straight A's from one school don't necessarily mean the same thing as straight A's from another.
AAh, there you go, my GD transferred to a new school in her senior year, and would have been valedictorian, based on her grades. Nobody in the family was the least bit concerned, we knew where she was going to college and based on her grades and test scores got a full scholarship, which was the reason she moved here in the first place.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.