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Laboy:
Race Politics is Ruining Lawrence
Tom Duggan
(07/03/07)
Lawrence Superintendent of
Schools Wilfredo Laboy has been under fire by critics
over the last month for his decision to house newly
arrived immigrant students with lack of English
proficiency in the old high school building
on Haverhill Street once the new $110 million campus is
officially opened.
Teachers union president Frank McLaughlin has
publicly protested Superintendent Laboys decision
calling it segregation, a word that has
spread like wild fire in the Spanish Language media in
Lawrence.
Latino activists have taken to the radio
waves calling Laboy a racist and likening his decision to
the racial segregation of the 1960s. Spanish
language newspapers also jumped on the bandwagon to brand
Laboy a segregationist, arguing that Laboy
was purposely denying Latino school children
the privilege of getting an education at the new high
school campus.
Its utterly ridiculous, Laboy told The
Valley Patriot.
This community needs to come to grips with its
diversity, he continued. We need to have
inter-group relations in Lawrence and we have to stop
blaming each other, stop whipping up racial resentment,
and put an end to the racist allegations that always seem
to be made in Lawrence.
We need to pick ourselves up and do whats
right. Everyone has the same opportunity in America and
using the word segregation to describe a program for at
risk immigrant kids who are temporarily housed in a
separate building is just plain wrong. It conveys to new
immigrant children that they are being picked on. And
because they dont know any better this word
segregation continues to get repeated and
believed as if we were holding classes for white
privileged kids in a brand new building while excluding
poor Latinos in a second class, dilapidated building.
Thats just not happening and as a Latino myself I
resent the accusation.
According to the Massachusetts Department of Education
more than 90% of the students attending Lawrence high
School are Latino.
Racial Segregation is Different from Segregating Based on
Need
I dont think segregated is a good word to
describe what we are doing here in the Lawrence Public
Schools. We do categorize and differentiate individual
children by their level of ability. Thats a
standard practice in any school system, Laboy said.
In any community you have kids with special needs,
whether it is Andover or North Andover, or anywhere else.
Kids with special needs are segregated in a
separate room where they can be attended to. So the
notion that we separate kids based on their needs is not
new to the American educational landscape. It is really
painful that people use this loaded word,
segregation. And they know what theyre
doing. They are using a word that goes to the heart of
racial segregation which came out of Brown vs. Board of
Education. They are using this word which, to newly
arriving Latinos means racism. Those who say we are
segregating are telling them that they are being
discriminated against because of their race and that just
isnt fair to anyone.
Laboy says the school system looks at the
educational profile of the individual student as
they come in to our schools and then places them
accordingly. We are segregating, or separating if you
will, based on individual need and, yes, the majority of
our non English proficient immigrants are Latinos. But
there are dozens of other countries being represented by
our newly arrived students. We have children coming from
Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South East Asian
countries and elsewhere. So to suggest that there is an
effort here to deprive Latinos of anything is blatantly
false.
Exactly What Programs Will be Housed on Haverhill Street?
According to Superintendent Laboy there will be at least
five programs housed at the old high school
on Haverhill Street which will be called the High School
Learning Center; Credit Recovery, the Newly Arrived
Program, Diploma Plus, the Adult Learning Center, and the
School for Exceptional Studies. The school will hold
600-650 students.
The Newly Arrived Program: Normally we get between
120-150 newly arrived students from other countries. Of
those, more than half stay for a year of transitional
programming, about ¼ of those kids make a mid year move.
The students are evaluated and moved to other program as
they progress.
Diploma Plus: This program is for kids with
personal challenges in the system. They are between the
ages of 16 and 22 who want a traditional MCAS diploma but
cant be in a regular classroom because of the
personal challenges they have. We only have 25 students
in that program now but we are expanding it to 50 to 75
kids.
Laboy says that many new students are out of age
and out of grade. What that means, he explains,
is that we get about 25 or 30 kids each year who
are seventeen or eighteen years old, but the last time
they attended class in their native country was the third
grade. Under the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution
it states that it is the responsibility of the state to
educate its citizens. So we have this thing called
compulsory education. From age 6 to age 16 we
are charged with educating every child that comes through
our doors. But we have many children who come to us at
age seventeen or eighteen. We are not required under the
law to put them in a day school program but, because we
are a moral country and we have a moral obligation to
help these young people, we take them in. We assess them,
and we place them in the program that best suits their
needs and thats a general education diploma. We
certainly cant take a 17 year old and put them in
the fourth grade, which might be their academic grade
level.
Credit Recovery: This is a program for students in the
tenth grade who dont have enough credits to
graduate. Laboy says that these students are put into an
accelerated course program designed to accommodate their
workload with what is called flex scheduling. Some kids
will stay there for the rest of their high school
experience, some kids will recover the credits they lost
or never took and get back on track within a short period
of time.
The Rest of the Story/Dispelling the Myths
Laboy says that placing at risk students at the High
School Learning Center on Haverhill Street is going to be
a vast improvement for those currently enrolled in these
programs. People can complain and criticize what we
are doing with at risk students, but look at where we are
taking them out of? We are taking them out of trailers
that are sitting on the playgrounds of a school and
putting them into a building that has a library, a
gymnasium, science labs, computer labs and all of the
things they are not getting where they are right now. How
come the people who are calling this
segregation, arent telling the
community that part of the story? When we say we are
putting them in the old high school building, and then
the nay-sayers paint a picture of a crumbling structure,
lets look at where these kids are now and the real
condition of that school.
Now, theres another myth I would like to
dispel, Laboy said emphatically. And that is
the notion that every single newly arriving immigrant is
going to be stuck at the old high school forever. We have
young people coming to us with basic native language
skills, who got a formalized education in the country
they come from, and are able to mainstream a lot faster
than some of the other immigrant children, so they will
be moved out of the program.
Then we have other children who come in close to
age and grade level, but they dont have the English
skills they need to be in a regular classroom. I say we
have a professional, moral and ethical responsibility not
to house them in a place where they are going to fall
further behind. I have an obligation as the
Superintendent of this school system to make sure that
these kids have the best possible chance to succeed. Now
I ask you, is brick and mortar really the issue here? Is
it really all that terrible that newly arriving students
are being housed separately until they are fully prepared
for a mainstream classroom? Or is this about something
else completely?
It didnt seem to bother these same people who
are complaining now when we had bilingual classes that
segregated kids based on their language. They fought
against ending segregated bilingual
classrooms. Some of the very same people calling this
racism were out there holding signs that said
Vote No on Question #2 remember that? Just a
few short years ago segregation was great, but somehow
they see it differently when Wilfredo Laboy wants to
separate students based on their individual needs and
educational assessment.
Sure, I could send these kids to that beautiful new
campus in a regular classroom without the special
attention they need and they will do what kids have been
doing for years; nine out of ten of them are going to
walk away
just walk away. We can either pay now or
we can pay later. We all know what happens to those kids
who drop out and the price we pay as a society when they
are out in the real world with no skills. They become
delinquents, criminals, they become a social liability to
society, and we pay far more in the end. I say we give
them what they need now. Because the tragic reality is,
for newly arriving non-English speaking students over a
four year period of time, the dropout rate for Latinos is
about 50%, and for at risk students it is closer to
80%.
Instead of labeling people racist and
using divisive language in a debate like this we ought to
be asking those who are complaining: what is your
responsibility? And what is our collective responsibility
as a community? I refuse, as the Superintendent of
schools, to accept failure and mediocrity as an option. I
believe the good people of Lawrence, those who really
care about providing a quality education, agree with me.
But for that handful of people who are using the race
card, talking about our ill treatment and
segregation of our students, I have to ask;
what solutions do you have? What kind of role model in
this community have you been? What constructive
engagement have you been involved in to help us educate
these children properly. How are you promoting positive
race relations? There is along way to go within certain
pockets of this community. They have an agenda and they
are going to promote hate and division in any way they
can to achieve a political end. I say race politics is
ruining this city, I have never seen anything like it and
I came to this city from New York.
Its really infuriating, Laboy concluded,
when you sit down and think about the fraud that is
being perpetuated on our newest and most vulnerable
students. We need to stop the politics of race, it is
ruining this city. You know, I used to hear a phrase all
the time when I first came here to Lawrence and it used
to make me angry. The phrase was only in
Lawrence. Now I know exactly what they were
saying.
Superintendent Laboy says he is moving forward with
his plan to place at risk students at the High School
Learning Center despite the criticism and harsh language
used to derail his plans.
Tom Duggan is the president of Valley Patriot,
Inc., a former Lawrence School Committeeman, and hosts
the Paying Attention! Radio Program on WCAP, 980AM, every
Saturday afternoon from noon-2pm. You can email your
comments to Tdugjr@aol.com
.
*Send your questions comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com
The July 2007 Edition of
the Valley Patriot
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