Parents in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg (NC) school district have banded together and created a website:
Welcome to the Dump [Don't Underestimate Mecklenberg Parents] CMS website. The goal of this site is to provide a place for Charlotte Mecklenburg residents to discuss the current state of the CMS school system and ways to improve it. While every discussion may not be positive, it is important that people have a place to voice their concerns and share their experiences. We encourage everyone to participate in the forums and be heard.
This article describes what's cooking with DumpCMS:
A movement to allow North Mecklenburg towns to take control of suburban schools from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district is gaining momentum, a group of parents and students said. The group, based out of Hopewell High School in Huntersville, has launched an effort to petition the state legislature for clearance to form their own school district. CMS leaders have ignored their concerns about overcrowding and safety, the parents said.
Hopewell is a 4-year-old school with 2,200 students. Just across town at North Mecklenburg High, 3,000 students are expected next year, creating the largest public school in the state. "We didn't expect the overcrowding, the trailers in the back, the violence and the lockdowns," said Lisa Blackmon, who moved to the area three years ago from Shelby. She hoped that Hopewell High would be a better school for her teenage daughter.
Blackmon's daughter, who asked that her name be withheld, said she has been threatened by other students and is scared for her safety while at school. "When you move to an area, you should be comfortable with your kids going to school and not feel threatened for their lives," Blackmon said.
Another frustrated parent has launched the Web site DumpCMS.com, calling for a secession from the district. The page designer claims more than 3,000 people visit the site every day...
CMS officials refused to comment on the movement, but a spokesperson said the district is working on addressing the concerns of the North Mecklenburg parents.
Here's the spot where parents can talk about the good, bad, and ugly of CMS. There are also links to articles about the issues and problems with CMS, like this one in indy newspaper Creative Loafing:
To understand what's going on here, you've got to go back to the school system's defeat in the Swann lawsuit[in 1999]. The educrats who run CMS have never gotten over their bitter loss in that case, and for years the resentment simmered at the Education Center. As I've opined before, since they could no longer legally bus kids to achieve racial balance in our schools, they immediately set out to overbuild schools in and around the center of the county while they let suburban ones overflow, setting the stage for the day they'd cap enrollment and begin to force white kids back into schools closer to the center of the county and African-American and Hispanic kids out to the suburbs.
As I correctly predicted last year, the system finally publicly announced it was studying a capping strategy last week.
The educrats genuinely believe that all education problems will be solved if the nirvana of white and minority children sitting next to each other in proper proportion in our schools is achieved. In the meantime, as they spent the last half decade and hundreds of millions of dollars on their stealth plan to desegregate the system, most of the poorest middle and high schools in the system lost 30 percent or more of their teachers year after year while the majority of students in those schools said they didn't feel safe in survey after survey. That left the neediest kids with the least experienced teachers. Though the system still flatly refuses to admit it, school safety and teacher turnover are not only related, but one drives the other.
The Devoted Reader who sent this my way said the issues have gotten little press in the Charlotte Observer so far, but that may change with another lawsuit that's in the works.
Posted by kswygert at February 17, 2005 12:44 PM