An email from Robert Bain deserves posting here and our concern:

“seeing the violence increasing within Shelby County; seeing the teachers in Shelby County who are unhappy with the new breed of children who are entering into the schools; and just seeing the parents in Shelby County who are fearful of the new breed of students.”

Words can be either friend or foe and within them one can lift-up or put-down.  Given my penchant for children, for education, for language; I responded negatively to the use of breed in describing….  That I might be alone in that sensitivity, makes it hurt none the less.

That to the side, I’m still confused:  what I read is that a Memphis based non-profit organization wants to create a charter school that would draw high school dropouts from Memphis.  This proposed Second Chance Academy, we read, “would help at-risk kids who’ve dropped out of city schools and keep troubled children from enrolling in county schools.”

Further, the article indicates that this is a win-win situation for the suburban school district because it would not draw students or funding out of the system and it would be (brace yourself) “saving the county from being polluted by bad children” and “Shelby County would actually lose nothing pretty much.”

Continued reading of the article reminds us that a) Shelby County doesn’t want charter schools and, more importantly, b) charter schools are intended to address failing schools of which the county system has none.  In other words, it seems that folks outside of Shelby County Schools are volunteering to take the bad breed out of Shelby County Schools with a backdoor charter school that the County is otherwise ineligible for.

This, to me, sounds not as much save the children as save the county from the city’s children that have or are moving into the county.

This may sound like an aside; but it is not intended to be so:

When MCS was looking at candidates for Superintendent, two candidates had a leg-up in my estimation in that they came from school systems that had many of the issues faced by Memphis (Richmond, Virginia and Miami, Florida).  The candidate from Miami had an additional advantage as he worked in Miami under former New York City Schools Superintendent Rudy Crews.

In New York City, they have what are known as 600 schools — my step-father taught at Manhattan High School, a 600 school.  These are schools that students are moved to when they cannot function in the normal school setting largely for discipline reasons.  These are the students that keep the other students in the class from learning.  Currently, MCS has a high school for drop-outs and I’ve read where Dr. Cash has made mention of what sounds like a 600 school system for Memphis whereby a student could be removed from a classroom/school where their behavior disrupts learning for the other students and put into a school that brings a different focus to the education process.

This has always sounded like a serve and save all our children concept.  The article in today’s paper, on the other hand, sounds like serve and save our county.  I could be wrong and it is only the use of the words breed and bad that has me thinking that someone thinks something else of themself than our children.