Side by side: A meaningful education has to include diversity

Years of allowing transfers from one district to another only account for some of what is facing the Wayne County Public Schools system as it gears up to tackle redistricting.

Other contributing factors are no doubt economic, academic and geographic. Some might even be sports related.

Whatever the cause, the situation is so out of hand now that the landscape of a school system in which at last count 13 of 33 schools were underperforming is so lopsided that elementary schools are overflowing and high schools, at least in the city, are a hundred students or more underpopulated.

And, in the case of Goldsboro High School, bereft of racial diversity.

That brings to mind one more potential factor which, if you talk to anybody old enough to have lived through integration, you won't need a bar graph to prove it to you, is race.

Some people simply don't want their kids going to school with children of other races. That is true, but it is a small number, to be sure.

We're talking about a different kind of racism. The one that hides itself behind phrases like "I'm worried about discipline problems" and "a lack of law and order in the classrooms."

All parents want, or should want, their child to have a better chance at receiving an education. That is undoubtedly true.

So why then should the student have to move schools to receive an acceptable education that prepares him or her for the responsibilities and demands of adulthood and is applicable to their lives?

The problems plaguing our school system and systems across the country are great in number and in difficulty to solve. But we cannot allow them to be so great that we deny our children the opportunity to be so as well.

And diversity has to be a part of that education. How can children of different races and ethnicities, religions and economic backgrounds learn to respect one another if they never meet or interact? If children don't learn to live and work side by side and share input on projects and cope with whatever differences might exist between them, what might that look like when they grow up and confront each other as adults?

Charlottesville?

Published in Editorials on August 13, 2017 10:32 PM