Posted on 03/05/2015 5:32:07 AM PST by Whenifhow
The Prince George’s County branch of the NAACP is threatening to sue the local school district over a plan to start two schools for an influx of immigrants in recent years.
“Segregation was eliminated back in 1954. When you have two schools that are designed to deal with one group based around basically language as the criteria for the schools, than that’s a form of discrimination,” Bob Ross, president of the local NAACP, told WAMU.org.
“It’s not about force, it’s not about choice, it’s about the law,” he said.
Ross is upset because a plan underway in Prince George’s County schools would establish two new schools for English language learners, or those with limited English proficiency. The effort is funded in part by a $3 million Carnegie Foundation grant dispersed over the next three years, but the schools are expected to cost $12 million, which would presumably siphon resources from black students.
“We have African American students that have the same needs as the population that thy want to service, so we’re saying create a program that’s inclusive,” Ross said.
Ross elaborated further for WSUA:
“It goes back to separate but equal. And we fought that battle 50 years ago,” said NAACP President Bob Ross, who fears school leaders will spend millions on Latino children and take the money from African American students who also need help.
“This is a very awkward position because black and brown, people try to say we have the same struggles,” said Ross. “But I sort of take it a little differently. We don’t have the same struggles because we came here for 400 years of slavery and moved forward. People who are arriving now are coming of their own free accord.”
But Prince George’s County Schools CEO Kevin Maxwell told WAMU “the NAACP is not correct on the law” and is pressing forward with the special schools.
“Lao vs San Francisco said that San Francisco had an obligation to provide programming that would level the playing field for Chinese-American students because they were lagging behind and the educational outcomes that they were receiving were not appropriate,” Maxwell said.
Odis Johnson, the associate chair of education at Washington University, seems to agree with Maxwell.
“It appears the NAACP is looking at this as a black versus brown bodies in the classrooms issue, rather than one of meeting children’s needs,” he told WAMU.
“Prince George’s County is changing, and it’s had an influx of Latino students and the school system has not changed as quickly to keep up with their educational need,” he explained.
“So now we’re at a situation where we can continue down a path towards educational isolation, which is something that Latino students feel when they’re in classrooms where they can’t interact or fully engage with the instruction, where the teachers do not have the skills necessary to meet their educational needs or facilitate learning, and that has to be one of the most pernicious forms of segregation where you are actually in the context but totally isolated and unable to benefit from all that’s going around.”
The result is obvious: “Less than a third are able to pass achievement tests and only 55 percent graduate, while the general student population scores around 77 percent in both of these categories,” according to the news site.
To fix the problem, school officials will launch International Academy within Largo High School, and a second standalone facility, CASA International School, will be built in the Langley Park neighborhood, close to thousands of Central American students who live in the area.
But PTSA President Valerie White doesn’t think it’s fair that school officials are pouring money into International Academy, which is expected to serve 100 ninth-graders with limited English, when Largo High School’s 1,100 traditional students. White contends the decision to house International Academy at Largo was also approved with little public input.
“They aren’t investing in our school, they are just investing in their school,” she said. “They way it’s a program, but it’s a school – a segregated school within a school – and … I really don’t think it’s going to go over well with our pupils, with our children,” she told WAMU. “They don’t understand; no one is explaining it to them.”
The NAACP’s Ross told the news site that if the school district doesn’t take action to address his concerns, he plans to take them up with County Executive Rushern Baker, who holds authority over district CEO Maxwell.
On Monday, WAMU reported that “Ross is meeting with Baker today and warns that the NAACP will file a lawsuit if the plan is not scrapped or significantly amended.”
Democrats: You’re old news N&*()%$! We have the whole nation of Mexico lining up to vote for us.
Get with the program NAACP. In the Leftie worldview Brown > Black.
“Segregation was eliminated back in 1954.”
So said the segregated NAACP
These fools do not even realize that they’re being replaced by a less grabby population of little folk.
The NAACP will quickly find that their days of being the head useful idiots will soon come to an end.
While the big wigs will still get their gold in order to be window-dressing, the lower rungs will be cut off.
I hve been waiting for this for over 20 years. So far the blacks have been chickenscats sticking up for themselves.
They DO know it; they are fighting for our tax dollars (to prevent them from being transferred from black gibsmedats to brown “da-me-esos”...
No, just as grabby. They just reproduce faster.
We’ve had this for years here in California. Some of the local schools are 100% Latino.
So when did they learn that brown is the new black?
We need those Latino votes to turn D.C. blue.
Is everybody as stupid as they sound.
My father told me of enrollment in a school the year AFTER he got off the boat from Europe in 1912. It was a school exclusively for IMMIGRANT, non-English speaking children from virtually EVERY country in Europe.
These children were told to speak ENGLISH only, taught to read ENGLISH only, and children from the same country were not allowed to speak their “home” language.
The order was “ENGLISH ONLY”
These, poor children of the “huddled masses” went through the OLD American school/education system and grew up to take over the country.
Study a list of the names in governor’s mansions, legislative bodies, and military commands and the courts of the country and there is where you will find the result of our “old, outmoded, old fashioned, and passe” school system.
To solve today’s problems, I’d go “Back to the PAST.” It worked a hell of a lot better than the “NEW?”
I taught ESL at Prince George’s CC, and the problem here is that in western PG, the ESL students are Latino, while in the east, they’re African and Caribbean. The black immigrants are interested in education, but the Latinos don’t really care all that much. That, along with Casa de Maryland, makes the Latinos “more special”.
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