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Editorials/Columns
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No Good Reason To Evict Poor Children From Their Schools
In January of this year,
the day after his father’s holiday, I shared a stage in Tal- lahassee with Martin Luther King III. Over 10,000 people stood before us, most of them minorities. Many had travelled all night from all corners of the state to send a message to the Florida teachers union: Don’t get between me and my child.
Technically, they were there to fight the lawsuit the union filed to kill the Florida tax credit scholarship. The program is serving 94,000 children from low income fam- ilies, including 24,000 in Cen- tral Florida. Over thirty percent of the children are black.
But the issue is bigger than the suit. The vast majority of us agree parents have the right to determine the educational destiny of their children. This isn’t a matter of politics. It’s a matter of fundamental de- cency.
So why does the union per- sist with its suit? It has been rebuffed twice now, first in cir- cuit court and then in appeals court. Both said the union couldn’t provide any evidence to back its claims of harm to public schools. Yet the union presses on with an appeal to the Florida Supreme Court.
Search in vain for an an- swer that has anything to do with helping children.
The union insists the schol- arship is an end-run around the 2006 Florida Supreme Court ruling that found the state’s first K-12 voucher un- constitutional. Never mind that scholarship was created in
2001. Never mind, too, that a tax credit scholarship isn’t a voucher. It’s funded by corpo- rate contributions, not govern- ment money – a distinction three state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have all found to be legally signifi- cant.
The union insists the schol- arship drains money from public schools. The claim is baseless. No less than seven in- dependent fiscal impact stud- ies have found the program saves taxpayer money that can be reinvested in public schools. Not a single study has found otherwise.
The truth is, school dis- tricts will be financially harmed if the union wins. The value of a scholarship, $5,886, is roughly 60 percent of per- pupil costs for public schools. So how will districts pay for a flash flood of 94,000 students? The scholarship children are geographically concentrated in areas of poverty. How will Dade County absorb 24,000 children in a day? Just two contiguous zip codes alone in Orange County have over 2,000 scholarship children. That district will be in chaos if the union prevails.
Despite the union’s talking points, the scholarship has nothing to do with a mythical plot to privatize, and every- thing to do with expanding op- portunity. Nearly 70 percent of scholarship students are black or Hispanic. Their average family income is $24,000 a year. Nearly a decade’s worth of test data shows us they were typically the lowest performers
in their prior public schools, but are now making solid progress.
This program isn’t a threat to public education—it’s a part of it. Forty years ago “public education” meant one thing: district run schools assigned to you by your zip code. But every child is different. Today, public education takes many forms— district run magnets, charters, virtual schools, dual enroll- ment with colleges. We even give vouchers to special needs children to attend private, faith based schools. Why is the union trying to kill the one program that serves poor chil- dren of color? A program that serves just 3 percent of our state’s K12 population, but its most vulnerable? Some dis- tricts, to their credit, recognize that we need to move away from uniformity and towards customization. In Dade County, over 60% of K12 stu- dent funded by the taxpayers do not attend their zoned pubic school.
Thankfully, more people see through the smokescreens. Over 200 black and Latino ministers from around the state have formally denounced the suit. The union’s former communications director wrote in the Tallahassee De- mocrat last month that he was no longer proud of the organi- zation. With its attack on the scholarship, he wrote, it was now engaged “in the immoral equivalent of a war on chil- dren.”
All these poor parents want is the power to do what fami- lies of means do every day—the power to find the best school for their children. Why would anybody deny them?
Rev. Dr. R.B. Holmes is the pastor of Bethel Mis- sionary Baptist Church in Tallahassee, and a mem- ber of the Save Our Schol- arships Coalition.
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‘If We Must Die’: Words That Changed The World
t was a poem that was originally a response to what
was called the “Red Summer,” a hurricane of race riots that swept through the South in 1919, leaving count- less Black Americans wounded or dead and destroying untold millions of dollars of property.
Surprisingly enough, an immigrant wrote it, Claude McKay from Jamaica, and the words of his poem seared themselves into the hearts of people around the world, even the heart of Sir Winston Churchill, who went on BBC radio and read McKay’s poem during Britain’s dark- est hour in World War II.
But for us, McKay’s work seems a suitable response for December 3rd of this year when members of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan are slated to march in Pelham, North Carolina.
The title of McKay’s poem is “If We Must Die.” It reads as follows: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs/ Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,/ While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,/ Making their mock at our ac- cursed lot./ If we must die, O let us nobly die,/ So that our precious blood may not be shed in vain;/ Then even the monsters we defy/ Shall be constrained to honor us though dead./ O kinsmen, we must meet the common foe!/ Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,/ And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow,/ What though before us lies the open grave?/ Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
McKay wrote those words 89 years ago. But as we face a racially uncertain future, let our enemies know, our re- sponse will not be docile.
Method, their states do not adhere to the winner-take-all method.
These states select one elector within each Congressional District by popular vote and
two electors by statewide popular vote, which result in a split of electors for each of the presidential candidates. If, Florida and other states used that system, Trump would not have won all of each states’ electors.
Because changing the American Constitution according to Article V (5) of the Consti- tution requires two-thirds of both houses (Senate and Representatives) or the act of a convention of states’ legislatures where 2/3 of the states request an amendment, only pressure from an overwhelming number of citizens could make that happen.
So, influencing each state’s electors not to vote for Donald Trump is the only chance of not having him sworn into office. Is the Electoral College outmoded? Can history be changed? Only the People should answer.
After The Protest, Then What?
T he time and energy spent by millions of marchers against the election of president-elect Donald Trump could very well be spent strategically lobbying the electors of the Electoral College, and/or working on a convention of 2/3 or more of America’s states to amend
the United Constitution.
While “pulling a camel through the eye of a needle”
may be easier than amending the United State Constitu- tion, the time for using a majority vote to elect America’s president has come.
Currently, all states except Maine and Nebraska have chosen electors to the Electoral College on a “winner- take all” (WTA) basis since the 1880s. Under that system, the states’ electors are awarded to the candidates with the most votes in that state. Because Maine and Nebraska choose their electors using the Congressional District
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PAGE 6 FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2016