Worst performing, most violent St. Louis students to be bused into St. Charles and Mehlville
Busing and School Integration - The Judges are at it again in St. Louis County
by St. Louis CofCC
by St. Louis CofCC
A Little History
Prior to 1937, students of the suburban North community of Berkeley constituted a substantial part of the Kinloch School District. Berkeley was a predominantly white city and Kinloch a smaller, overwhelmingly black city. In 1937, the court forced the residents of Berkeley to create a new school district for white students, leaving the Kinloch district for black students. This action was taken to conform to a requirement of the Missouri state constitution at that time.
Parents protesting forced busing in St. Louis in 1971.
Though integrated by 1971, Federal Judge James Meredith ruled that the creation of the Berkeley district was a violation of Title iv of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and sought a remedy. He initially ordered the Berkeley district, which by then was 41% black, to merge with the Kinloch district, but knew that this would not effect the desired racial mix, due to a shortage of white students in those two districts. To remedy this, he ordered the highly rated 95% white and much larger Ferguson-Florissant district, which had no involvement or culpability for the original problem, to bear the brunt of the solution by annexing the merged Berkeley-Kinloch districts. As this progressed, selected schools were closed in Berkeley-Kinloch, schools were built and refurbished in Ferguson-Florissant, and two-thousand additional students would now be bused back and forth between certain grades of Ferguson-Florissant schools and the remaining schools in the Berkeley area. Meredith also ordered Berkeley to substantially increase its school tax rate to defray additional costs.
This abomination of social engineering by an all-powerful federal judge, using children as pawns is largely responsible for the great decline of the once excellent middle-class communities directly involved in these actions and the general mass exodus of whites from North St. Louis County to St. Charles County across the Missouri River, driving the tremendous growth and economy of that region and its schools. In the wake of this exodus of whites, property values plummeted, businesses suffered and major shopping centers were vacated. A glut of low priced housing became available, and as more minorities saw the new district as welcoming to them, they bought fine homes in these formerly white communities at increasingly depressed prices, and recently for 30 to 50 cents on the dollar of worth, relative to similar homes elsewhere.
To no one’s surprise, (except perhaps the liberals of Ferguson-Florissant), as minority enrollments increased, formerly quiet and orderly classrooms became chaotic and unruly, discipline problems increased and academic achievement declined. In 1995, a white female senior high student was brutally beaten, raped and murdered in a restroom stall by a black student.
Judge Meredith’s creation and legacy, the Ferguson-Florissant School District is now 75% black, 22% white and is just barely maintaining its accreditation.
Fast Forward to 2013
Forty-Two years later it appears that judges have learned nothing from the past except how to again dump the problems of one district onto another undeserving district and make it appear that an unsolvable problem is solved.
The Missouri Supreme Court has recently ruled that the students of two failed and now unaccredited, overwhelmingly black North county school districts can opt to attend schools in other districts in St. Louis County or in adjacent counties, including St. Charles County, with tuition and transportation costs to be paid by the failed districts. These districts are the once excellent, formerly white Normandy district, and the formerly white highly rated Riverview Gardens district. These districts have suffered from administrative corruption, misuse of funds, incompetence of teachers and other staff, indifference of parents and students, and severe discipline problems. Poor administrative leadership, discipline and behavior problems, uninspired, burned-out or otherwise unqualified teachers, combined with students who either haven’t the ability or the desire to learn the subject matter equals an unsolvable problem. Transferring students who are academically deficient, who lack ability and desire to learn. or who are discipline and behavior problems, just transfers part of the problem to the new school. And some problems cannot be fixed no matter how much money you throw at them: An intelligence deficit is one of them. . . .
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