Friday, November 05, 2010

Diversity in the District

I spent most of my school-aged years, and my first 4 years of teaching, in two of the districts that, a few years ago, merged into the Twin Rivers Unified School District in the greater Sacramento area. Let's see what's going on there:

Strained relationships and feelings of mistrust are plaguing the Twin Rivers Unified School District, where many African American parents, community activists – and even two school board members – say the tensions stem from a lack of diversity among the district's top administrators...

Conflicts over how best to educate the children of the neighboring communities are not new. The districts that merged in 2008 are distinct, with Interstate 80 practically drawing a line between a northern rural area that includes Rio Linda, where most residents are white, and the southern urban end, such as Del Paso Heights, with a large minority population.

The merger was supposed to fix the fractured system.

One commenter has what might be a good fix on the issue:

Complaining about who is on a management team because their skin is not the right color sounds like racism on the part of the complainer to me.


My guess is that there are other issues at play, and the race argument is the one that some people know will get attention. But that's just my guess.

2 comments:

Ellen K said...

If you want to see tension in a public school district, look no further than Dallas ISD. African Americans pushed diversity with the help of judges who believed that instead of changing attendance zones, kids would learn more about diversity riding upwards of an hour in a school bus everyday. At that point, even minority parents were seeking out private schools close to home. Now we have population of Hispanic administrators and teachers who do not work well with those who led the fight to desegregate thirty years ago. The infighting is intense and in the meantime,except for magnet schools, parents leave the district in droves.

Anonymous said...

The comments following the article were an interesting read; particularly ones from someone who is apparently a CA teacher's union member. I say "apparently" because the comments are so far from literate that they are difficult to understand. I hope her job does not require literacy (are there such in the union?).