Alabama: Hispanic Students Vanish From School

Alabama began cracking down on illegal immigration.  As a result, many Hispanic students vanished from Alabama public schools.  Hispanic parents kept their kids at home in fear of attracting attention from authorities.  Huntsville school district’s superintendent went on a local television show to try to calm parents down.  “In the case of this law, our students do not have anything to fear,” Casey Wardynski said in halting Spanish. He urged families to send students to class and explained that the state is only trying to compile statistics.  More than 200 students were absent after the court’s ruling.

Authorities can, now, question anyone suspecting of being in the United States illegally.  The Obama administration filed court documents Friday announcing its plans to appeal the ruling that upheld the law.

The first word that came to mind was “xenophobia”.  This country was founded upon immigration.  This seems like self-hate to me.  Why do foreigners incite so much fear?  Historically, our economy could not have been so successful if it wasn’t for immigration.  Opportunity and freedom are what makes our country so strong!

North Carolina: The Resegregation of Public Schools

In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson established “separate but equal”.

In 1954, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka decision was passed and declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students are unconstitutional.

In 2009,  David and Charles Koch fund organizations (such as the Tea Party) that are pro-privatization and against large public schools.  The Wake County School Board began to implement a neighborhood school plan that would re-segregate schools. The Koch brothers founded Americans for Prosperity (2004) and utilized hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Wake County School Board Elections.  This jeopardizes the diversity policy.

Wake county uses a system of integration based on income.  You can’t talk about class without discussing race.  Under this program, no more than 40 percent of any school’s students could receive free lunches (mostly minority students). The NAACP has filed a complaint and argued that this plan is unconstitutional.

In October (2011), Wake County elections will decide if the schools will become re-segregated.

Is this unconstitutional and is it fair to make the connection of race and class?

Take a look at this short clip: