Our views: Classroom equality floridatoday.com FLORIDA TODAY:
"Separate but equal was inherently unequal and harmful to black students.
That was the U.S. Supreme Court’s finding in the watershed 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that mandated school integration and helped trigger the civil rights movement’s crusade for racial equality in public schools in the 1950s and 1960s."
Most Americans rightly view the desegregation order as a triumph over prejudice.
But its legacy is one reason some 120 black students who live closest to University Park Elementary in Melbourne are nonetheless bused to 10 other schools, some more than nine miles away, conforming with a 40-year-old federal order forbidding black- or white-only schools.
Students in three other neighborhoods, one each in Cocoa, Titusville and Rockledge, are also affected by the policy.
Targeting mostly minority kids for busing to achieve diversity seems unfair, and the situation needs review.
"Separate but equal was inherently unequal and harmful to black students.
That was the U.S. Supreme Court’s finding in the watershed 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that mandated school integration and helped trigger the civil rights movement’s crusade for racial equality in public schools in the 1950s and 1960s."
Most Americans rightly view the desegregation order as a triumph over prejudice.
But its legacy is one reason some 120 black students who live closest to University Park Elementary in Melbourne are nonetheless bused to 10 other schools, some more than nine miles away, conforming with a 40-year-old federal order forbidding black- or white-only schools.
Students in three other neighborhoods, one each in Cocoa, Titusville and Rockledge, are also affected by the policy.
Targeting mostly minority kids for busing to achieve diversity seems unfair, and the situation needs review.
