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Let
Duluth
Vote’s
“Deseg” report to the Minnesota Commissioner of Education.
The first likely casualties of the Red Plan will be the
district’s magnet schools. In their place will come a division of the city
that will segregate the
Duluth
schools as never before. Ironically, one of the primary statutes being invoked
by the Duluth School Board to divide
Duluth
on the basis of race is one of the very laws which gives school districts with
“integration plans” the right to build without resort to a referendum,
Minnesota Statute Section 126C.40, Subdivision 6 – Installment Contracts and
Lease Purchase Agreements. This law can be found in part on page 103 of the
District’s report for review and comment.
The Eligibility requirements of this statute include under
section (b) quote: “A district, for purposes of this statute, means a school
district required to have a comprehensive plan for the elimination of
segregation, determined to be in compliance by the Commissioner of Education.”
The plan submitted to the Minnesota Deptarment of Education
proposes the most racially divisive boundary possible for the
Duluth
School District. On the western side of the bifurcated
Duluth
the three most racially concentrated neighborhoods: They include the West end,
the
Central Hillside
and the
East Hillside
.
Page six of JCI’s report for comment and review shows the
designated line at
14th Ave East
. It has been chosen because it most clearly divides the District into two
roughly equal student populations. In addition to lumping the vast majority of
the City’s current anf future minority students in the western half of the
School District
, so too it concentrates the free and reduced lunch population which is the
euphemism applied to the children of poorer families.
And to compound the injury the Red Plan makes no provision
for the continuance of the District’s Commissioner approved Desegregation
Program which the District has relied on for twenty years to racially balance
the district voluntarily.
Page 6 of JCI’s report for review and comment shows the
new division of the
Duluth
School District
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