Another View: Board should take new look at school closures
Published: Sunday, Aug. 4, 2013 - 12:00 am | Page 2E
The July 24 editorial, "Forget the lawyers, focus on the students," which criticized the parents who brought a legal action against the Sacramento City Unified School District for its decision to close selected elementary schools missed the point. The issue before the court was not the need to close schools – but its selection of particular schools for closure.
• The district selected for closure elementary schools that were located in struggling, poor neighborhoods, mostly those where African American, Mexican American, Latino, Hmong and other minorities are concentrated. The court issued a 39-page decision, finding that the school closures will have a discriminatory impact on racial minorities. The court also found "troubling" the district's removal of certain schools in affluent neighborhoods from the closure list, even though these schools were less financially "efficient" than those ordered closed – exposing the weakness of the claimed justification for the closure of the selected schools.
• The parents and community members in neighborhoods facing the school closures filed suit in federal court as a last resort. The district's flawed closure decisions left the communities out of the