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EDITORIAL: Damaging Compliance

Posted on: Friday, 29 July 2005, 21:00 CDT

Jul. 29--When School Board members last grappled publicly with a 1980s court order demanding mathematically precise racial enrollment equality at Patterson Elementary School, in February 2003, we said, "Closing Patterson is nobody's first choice, probably." After reading Brady Calhoun's report of Thursday, "School Board researching options for Patterson," our view now is that closing the school is advisable.

First, no compelling practical reasons argue for keeping this business open. With some 300 students, it's too small to be a cost efficient. It serves no geographic market that other schools can't easily and conveniently absorb. The court order demands one contorted effort after another from the School Board, making compliance for any significant period of time virtually impossible. Logic says, cut your losses.

We know this is a sensitive topic.

Older generations remember Patterson as the county's last traditionally black school to undergo integration. Despite all the evil associated with Jim Crow, older black citizens remember also a cultural cohesiveness within the black community that seemed to weaken as the larger community integrated. Patterson thus remains a symbol of some good times, too.

Still, the longer Patterson is flung about under federal court, the harder it becomes for yet another generation of Bay County children to understand why school segregation was a bad thing, or even to understand what real segregation was. Now, black children who live just blocks from the school cannot go to Patterson for the sole reason they are black. Solely because they are white, white children who live less near Patterson can't attend other schools open to other children countywide.

To entice more white children to enroll in Patterson, the school offers the separate advantage of a technology curriculum vastly superior to that offered in the district's other schools. White children can transfer to Patterson to profit from that advantage. Black children can't.

"This is madness," a black grandmother told the School Board on Wednesday.

That it is. The federal court calls it desegregation, though, and by this madness redefines for young children black and white alike the very word, desegregation. What a shame. Bay County, cut your losses.

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Source: The News Herald

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