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Bammy Charter School Makes Reason . . . Nick does West Alabama . . .
https://reason.com/blog/2018/08/16/decades-after-brown-v-board-of-education
Earlier this week, something momentous, something historic, happened in Sumter County, the poorest county in Alabama and a place with a long history of segregation: A publicly funded school opened in which the student body was actually racially integrated.
Welcome to the University Charter School in Livingston, which serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Situated on the campus of the University of West Alabama, the school had to fight court battles against the local board of education in order to open and is one of just three charters currently operating in the state.
Charter schools are funded with tax dollars but are free from many of the bureaucratic rules and requirements that traditional, residential assignment schools have. In 2015, according to federal education statistics, about 3 million, or 6 percent of K-12 students, attended charters; in 2000, only 1 percent of students did. Parents and students must choose to enroll in a particular charter, which typically gets less money per student than traditional public schools. Yet charters are routinely attacked for "draining away" money and "skimming the best students" from conventional public schools. As the University of Arkansas' Jay P. Greene has pointed out, studies that control for individual student ability consistently find charters improve academic outcomes especially among minority students in urban districts. Charters are also criticized for promoting segregation because they disproportionately serve poor and minority students in racially isolated areas. For instance, in her 2017 book Democracy in Chains, Duke historian charges that the modern school choice movement, including charter schools, is a covert way to perpetuate racial division in K-12 education.
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. . .after he retired from the Air Force.
Sumter County is one dirt poor county. All the little businesses in York, Livingston, Geiger, Cuba, etc are slowly drying up.
There was a noted race riot in Emelle, AL in 1930 as the result of a dispute over a $4.50 car battery. My great-grandfather ordered his sons to not get involved in the killings. He actually helped an innocent black man who was being chased to get out of town by driving him to Mississippi. Sixty years later when my father was running for Sumter County Tax Accessor, the grandson of the man that my great-grandfather helped spoke out in favor for my father against an African American man who was running against my dad.
