Wow. This is hard to wrap your head around. Tom Forcella, superintendent of Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools, is opposing a proposed charter school that would be named for Howard and Lillian Lee because it could, in the words of the News & Observer, “erode” the district’s diversity.
“There would be, I think, a detrimental impact to our district in that our minority numbers are not huge and that if this were to come to fruition in the (enrollment) numbers they are hoping to generate, it could significantly decrease our numbers as far as minority students – and I know this district and this community value diversity,” Forcella said. “And we would not want to see those numbers go down in our schools and we actually would want to see us do a better job in working with it and keep the numbers up to where they are now.”
You see, the problem is, there aren’t that many black and Hispanic students in the district (which is 54.6 percent white), so a school that diverted even a couple hundred minority students would damage the racial mix in the rest of the district.
District officials aren’t entertaining the retrograde notion that black and Hispanic kids learn more sitting next to whites, are they?
To this mindset, “diversity” is so important that nothing can “erode” it, even if doing so might help kids who’ve been failed by the policies implemented by these kids’ “benefactors” in the school district.
Oh yeah, and the district worries because the school would reduce the district’s per-pupil funding from the state by about $10,000 per student. Well, duh. If you lose enrollment, you lose money. As someone said, that’s not ideology, it’s math.
