When Title I betrays the entitled
Written by redqueeninla in LAUSD
This just has to be said and it’s not pretty.
Why on earth does LAUSD refuse to fund schools of 40-49% poverty concentration? The charade about leeching a critical “$5 dollars” from a “truly poor” child who simply cannot afford its loss, the absence of which a privileged person (such as myself) could never understand due to exclusion from the club-of-the-oppressed, just doesn’t hold water.
First, as board member Monica Ratliff pointed out during Tuesday’s 11/12/13 LAUSD board meeting, that $5 per capita does not make or break a school’s supplemental anti-poverty funding. It just doesn’t. And conversely, the absence of the allocation, lower because of the funding formula that gives less for kids attending schools of middling poverty concentration (pc), and fewer dollars needed as there are fewer such kids present – the monies on the line for the schools in the 40-49% pc category, absolutely and undeniably WILLmake-or-break those schools. It is a matter of life-or-death for those schools, not in the sense that without these monies the schools will close (since after all these funds are mandated for supplemental, and never core institutional needs), but in the crucial sense that: that which characterizes those schools — vitality, functionality, exciting prospects, a safe-heaven for learning that really, truly, actually happens — this is what is on the line. This is what will die. So in this sense, without anti-poverty funds, these schools will be broken because their essence will drain away.
Diversity is the key to raising people out of poverty. Everyone’s boat must