No! No! No! You're Getting the Omaha School District Story All Wrong!

[norml]

Actually it's a victory for that poorer blacker district.

Now the right wing radio clowns have picked up on it as an opportunity to bash "Those who would divide us by race and class".

This started out as a fight to keep an annexed wealthy white suburban community out of the Omaha school district.

There's been a lot of rural opposition to school consolidation.

They say their communities are better served by smaller school districts.

State Senator Ernie Chambers put forward the proposition that maybe all the communities would be better served by smaller school districts.

Right wing radio clowns bash any mention of race or class as "Waging race and class warfare".

Don't buy their lie.

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Law to Segregate Omaha Schools Divides Nebraska

By SAM DILLON
Published: April 15, 2006

OMAHA, April 14 — Ernie Chambers is Nebraska's only African-American state senator, a man who has fought for causes including the abolition of capital punishment and the end of apartheid in South Africa. A magazine writer once described him as the "angriest black man in Nebraska."

Kent Sievers/Omaha World-Herald

Ernie Chambers, the only African-American in the Nebraska Legislature, was a major force behind a law enacted this week that calls for dividing the Omaha school district into three districts defined largely by race.
He was also a driving force behind a measure passed by the Legislature on Thursday and signed into law by the governor that calls for dividing the Omaha public schools into three racially identifiable districts, one largely black, one white and one mostly Hispanic.

The law, which opponents are calling state-sponsored segregation, has thrown Nebraska into an uproar, prompting fierce debate about the value of integration versus what Mr. Chambers calls a desire by blacks to control a school district in which their children are a majority.

Civil rights scholars call the legislation the most blatant recent effort in the nation to create segregated school systems or, as in Omaha, to resegregate districts that had been integrated by court order. Omaha ran a mandatory busing program from 1976 to 1999.

"These efforts to resegregate schools by race keep popping up in various parts of the country," said Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, adding that such programs skate near or across the line of what is constitutionally permissible. "I hear about something like this every few months, but usually when districts hear the legal realities from civil rights lawyers, they tend to back off their plans."


snip


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/15/us/15omaha.html?hp&ex=1145073600&en=5967d6e8f52a9362&ei=5094&partner=homepage

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2225546&mesg_id=2225546

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x938165

[acmavm]

1. I've already said that this was Chamber's way of getting more say for

the black members of the community when it comes to funding and policy of the Omaha school districts. Not everyone is stupid enough to believe the lies. They always put a bad spin on everything Chambers does.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=936511&mesg_id=936556

[norml]

2. Of course you know what's going on.

You live here.

[acmavm]

4. Yep, I live here and I know the intellectual handicaps of most of the

citizens of the Big 'O' (which undoubtedly stands or Orifice). They aren't smart enough to figure their way out of a room with a door on each side. They need to be told what to think about an issue and right now they're being lied to about what Chambers did and why.

[BlooInBloo]

3. Aahhh... the new mantra...

Segregation: good for black folks, good for you! (wink)