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The more I read about this mother, the more I wonder if she's related to "Cowboy" from "Big Brother 5."

I can also speak from personal experience when it comes to a cross-country, cross-cultural move. We moved from coastal Massachusetts to central Louisiana two years ago. Here they are under a 40-year-old court order to enforce desegregation in the school system. They have to bus the kids a considerable distance away from their homes in order to enforce it.

When I first arrived, it was explained to me that parents were going to drastic lengths to circumvent the busing rules, such as putting their houses up for sale or using Grandma's address so their children could stay in all-white areas. We were temporarily staying with family members who had a very desirable address in this regard, so we were held up to intense scrutiny as to whether or not we really lived there. The day I signed a lease for a place of our own, I was ordered to march straight into the classroom and remove my daughter from class immediately because she couldn't stay in the all-white school any more and had to be transferred to another district. Attending this new school meant busing my daughter into another town along a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway.

Because I was new to the area, I didn't know about an intriguing loophole in the rules until well into the school year. I discovered that the best schools were often located in the worst neighborhoods. If you want to get your child a really good education here, you can arrange for what they call a "Majority-to-Minority" transfer. They dangle some excellent carrots in front of parents who are open-minded enough to look past racial balance, such as tuition-free Montessori and magnet schools. The kids who participate in these programs get free busing, too, because the idea is to attract smart white kids from the outlying suburbs to attend inner city schools.

I took a lot of criticism from people for transferring my daughter into one of these schools, which happened to be 99% black at the time they were recruiting. It was a real leap of faith on my part. I was willing to risk it, though, because I knew that an education of this calibre would have only been available in private schools up North, with tuition around $15,000/year.

By the first day of school, however, it turned out that I wasn't the only white suburban parent who crossed over. In fact, I didn't see a single black parent on orientation night. The staff is mostly white, too. After three years of recruiting, I think they've got the racial balance down to about 60% black now. There has never been an unpleasant episode with regard to race since my daughter has been at this school, and I have never had any reason to regret the decision I made.

But, unlike the Oklahoma mother, I did my research and I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. I wasn't sitting around humming "Ebony and Ivory," so to speak.