I don't want my kid to be the only white student . . .

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If this really is at BASIS, talk with the administration -- they will SHUT THIS DOWN.

I think someone got carried away with herself and assumed "BASIS" when she heard "new school" - but from the poster's description it does not at all sound like BASIS. BASIS is not the only "new" school in town.

Proof: [/b] She is in 6th grade at a new school. Most of the kids come from very poor neighborhoods with social problems, and she lives in a very wealthy neighborhood. There are also a few[b] white high SES kids in her class but they are not her friends.
What other new Charter school has open with a 6th garde class and HIGH SES white children?

The poster said her child was in a "new school" which could also mean that the school was new to that particular child in that they changed schools. Way to go with making assumptions.




No matter what school it is, the pp should definitely report this to the school.

CWC here. Sorry, English is not my first language. The school is new to my daughter, not new. It is not a charter school which is why I said it was important to us - it feeds into the high school we want, and we have a younger child so removing her is not an option we want to consider.

THE SCHOOL IS NOT BASIS OR LATIN.

I guess I did a really good job of hiding who we are and where she is but these school should not be mixed up in this. 6th grade is the new school year for most of us now right?

But please do not now start guessing other schools because you will get closer and obviously we have to deal with this. So it would be better for my family if this part of the discussion just stopped now.

I guess I should have said this was not my country. The posts about the dispora and variety of cultures within the community and the filthy rap lyrics was why I asked on this thread in case there was something I was missing - as people have said, there are many different cultures in the aA community, and at our school before this there was only one. We did not belong naturally to that one either but again my daughter gets along well with many people.

THANK YOU to everyone who responded sincerely. I am going to take your advice, alhough honestly I am now more scared becaise it sounds to me like you think the boy might be dangerous.

At our old school that would not have crossed my mind, just maybe that he had problems. And I knew most of the parents. This is a new school and we do not know many people. We also do not feel like we know the head. The reason I did not talk to my friends is I did not want to hurt the boy if it was nothing and have others thinking badly about the school because the more mix we get the better. I am only sorry that people started guessing it was Latin or Basis because they sound like very good schools. But it is obvious we could not get in to them in 7th grade. I never even heard about Basis last year.

Ok. So we will report. Again thank you. And I apologise because this really was a questiion of culture, not race. But so many here seem to see race where I see culture I thought it was the right place to ask. I feeel stupid and scared. Wish us luck and please continue with this discussion because it is mostly all things I never knew and I'm sure I am not alone.

Thank you,
clueless white chich

Sorry, I work at DCPS but am not a teacher and still don't believe a word of this for a number of reasons; I could post them but won't. Like to give you the benefit of the doubt but can't. Lady, there are filthy rap lyrics everywhere, and the largest group with the most purchase power and also in control of the record company are whites!!! I really don't know what more to say, it's a shame that race even came into this!!!

[Anonymous]

^ Care to show some direct evidence of where it is that whites are the ones directing rappers to be filthy, or where it's whites who are the primary consumers of filthy rap?

I think it's you who people should not be believing a word of.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^ Care to show some direct evidence of where it is that whites are the ones directing rappers to be filthy, or where it's whites who are the primary consumers of filthy rap?

I think it's you who people should not be believing a word of.

It's amazing how the music business is run by black people, just like the NBA!!!!

[Anonymous]

I'm a black woman. A mother of two. unfortunately the way some white people think is reality. why would anyone want their children around cursing, anger, negativity, bad influences. black or white. The reality is, we as a people, whether "we" want to admit it or not, have had a history of violence and anger that has been passed down generation to generation. It's not our fault how we got this way given the history of violence and injustice blacks endured, we learned that behavior. Then we passed it down. But, its our reality. I see it in our children, who only repeat what they hear at home, are early victims, and/or feel the burden and weight of their parents. Not only am I a mother, I'm also a teacher in an DC charter school. Pre-K, kindergarten, etc. I've seen and worked with countless broken, angry children in my young career. Some with no boundaries. I, too, think twice about where I put my child. And I am black. We need to not be ashamed about our people and our demise, but work together to try to lift us up again. It's deeper than we think. So, can we blame them?

[Anonymous]

This has nothing to do with white or black, it's about ghetto culture. Blacks, whites, latinos have all been guilty of bad behavior coming from ghetto culture. Let's stop injecting race and call it for what it is - the color of one's skin is not the problem. The behavior and culture is what is the problem.

[Anonymous]

^^ true, but in DC, "ghetto culture" is black. Maybe there are other "ghetto"s in VA and MD, but not in DC.

[Anonymous]

To answer the original question, some white middle class families are ok with their child being the only white/middle class kid in a classroom, so long as that classroom is a PS3 or PK4 class. All the people who responded to this post w/ a child who is an "only" are early childhood parents. In my experience, sometimes white parents use this as a point of pride, or for semi-shock value. "My kid attends ______ school." Everyone knows that school is majority black, and maybe raise an eyebrow. Or other white parents might be fine with this temporary placement because they've had a positive experience, as preschool students are more accepting of each other. But come kindergarten, typically 100% of those parents flee those schools. They often give reasons like "we moved for other reasons," or "it wasn't meeting my child's academic needs." But really, it's about race and class.

In schools where there is good racial diversity, there is rarely good socioeconomic diversity. So where parents again talk about their kid's diverse school with a sense of pride, chances are that school has relatively little poverty.
Race and socioeconomic status and culture all matter, clearly, when we pick schools for our kids.

I've had the same experience as a previous poster regarding extending playdates to non-white friends. My son is white, in a classroom with 4 African-America kids, 1 Asian child, 3 Hispanic kids, 5 biracial kids, and 7 white kids. When we invite his classmates over to play, the black and Hispanic kids never come. At his birthday party, we invited the whole class. All the white and biracial kids came, but none of the others. I'm wondering if those kids are poor and can't afford to buy birthday presents? Is there a culture divide that says our kids can't play together? Do those kids have other commitments on weekends related to race or class or income??

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^^ true, but in DC, "ghetto culture" is black. Maybe there are other "ghetto"s in VA and MD, but not in DC.

DC also has many high-SES AAs and AAs who want no part of ghetto culture. So let's stop conflating and equating the two. AA is not the problem. AA is not relevant to the real issue, and AAs should not feel attacked when it's all about ghetto culture, as opposed to a misperception that it's an attack on AAs across the board. Ghetto culture is the problem, ghetto culture is what needs to be dealt with.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^ true, but in DC, "ghetto culture" is black. Maybe there are other "ghetto"s in VA and MD, but not in DC.

DC also has many high-SES AAs and AAs who want no part of ghetto culture. So let's stop conflating and equating the two. AA is not the problem. AA is not relevant to the real issue, and AAs should not feel attacked when it's all about ghetto culture, as opposed to a misperception that it's an attack on AAs across the board. Ghetto culture is the problem, ghetto culture is what needs to be dealt with.

Well, how then should it be "dealt with"? No one has argued that D.C. doesn't have high SES AAs. The argument is that, in DC, most of the poorest people happen to be AA. It's not saying all AA in DC are poor. It's saying most of the poor in DC are AA. There's a difference in those two statements.

[Anonymous]

Doesn't poor and public school almost have the same identity as in rich and private. We might be the poorest but we aren't the most needy and greedy. I am not saying all whites are needy and greedy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Doesn't poor and public school almost have the same identity as in rich and private. We might be the poorest but we aren't the most needy and greedy. I am not saying all whites are needy and greedy.

Sincerely, I'm not sure I understand what you are saying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think I understand what you're saying, or I'm giving the benefit of the doubt.

I don't want my child to be the "only" something: the only girl, the only white child, the only child from an agnostic family, fill-in-the-blank. I also hope that someone else's child isn't the "only" anything: only mixed-race, only Hindi, only non-native English speaker, only child with 2 dads, etc. I try to strike a balance between teaching her to appreciate her uniqueness, and also feeling part of a group. I sign her up for team sports so she can learn to be a good team-member and work towards a shared goal. I sign her up for individual lessons where her success or failure rests on her own efforts. I put her in a school with children of all different kinds of backgrounds to broaden her horizons, and help her learn to relate to all kinds of people.

I know I'm not alone here - aren't we all trying to find the right balance for our children? I can understand someone not wanting to be the "only" of any race or background, not out of dislike or mistrust, but because it's a dynamic I think is at odds with real life, at least most of the time.

I hope that doesn't make me racist, but I'll have to live with it if it does because it's what is best for my family.

Thank you. Exactly this. Reason, empathy, and reality.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

You're right, PP. Your post makes me think about the all-AA teaching staff and K+ voting out all the white officers of the new PTA at Payne ES on Capitol Hill almost a year ago. The PTA has only been up and running for a year at the time. The group was rolling with white and biracial leadership, parents of kids in the first racially diverse PreS3 group, which AA stakeholders so resented that they staged a take-over. The PTA hasn't met since, and every former white officer will be gone by the summer (no whites staying for K, let alone elementary grades). The school remains almost entirely AA (a touch Latino) above PreK4, and failing, with awful test scores. So darn depressing, and predictable.

Wow, there are so many problems with your post. A group of parents join a school, and even though they only have kids at one grade level, they stage a take over of the PTA. They describe a parent organization that only serves 1/8 of the grades in the school as "rolling". These same parents clearly don't value the students currently in the school, given that they refer to the demographic in the older grades as "darn depressing". They seem to think that raising test scores, not by actually helping students, or serving them better, but by swapping out kids for demographics more likely to succeed is the same thing as "improving" the school.

When the parents of kids in the older grades, as well as the teachers who love and serve them, respond by trying to take on leadership roles in the program they are described as staging a "take-over" and accused of racism. The irony is enormous. Thank god the racist white parents left!
But apparently the PTA is no longer functioning and does not meet. So how has this AA coup helped the school exactly?

A PTA that serves a small minority of students, is a far bigger problem for a school than a non-existent PTA.

REALLY??? Wow.

+1. Can see why everyone who could leave, left. So everything is still the status quo with scores in the toilet? Hurray for the winners in the now non-existent PTA wars!

You do realize that the solution to low test scores, isn't to replace or dilute the low scoring kids with affluent white kids. The only solution that counts is one where the same kids, or their little siblings, actually improve their performance.

That isn't to say, that increasing the socio-economic diversity at a school can't be part of the solution. If affluent families join a school, with the aim of really joining the community, making friends, volunteering and supporting all the students in the class, and advocating for and financially supporting changes that support all students, it can be a good thing.

But that begins with forming relationships, respecting the existing community, and coming to the table ready to learn and not just assuming your role is to teach. Without these things, the result is simply that kids who desperately need PS and PK spaces will lose them to affluent outsiders, and a white PTA that's out of touch with the community the school serves will advocate for policies that serve a tiny sliver of the population.

So the old timers got upset that the new prek3 and prek4 parents came in and tried to get things done without consulting them. How dare they! So they banded together to throw the interlopers out and immediately resumed "the way it's always been": doing Nothing... No PTA, nothing. Well done.

This pattern seems to play out again and again. It happened at Frances Stevens a few years ago too. There's got to be a way for families of new studentse who want to help a school to do it without being hated by those who are already there.

[Anonymous]

This pattern seems to play out again and again. It happened at Frances Stevens a few years ago too. There's got to be a way for families of new studentse who want to help a school to do it without being hated by those who are already there.

To clarify, Payne HAD NO PTA before the "gentrifiers" set one up in 2010. Moreover, the IB parent group setting up the PTA was mixed racially, not just white, but biracial, black and Arab. These parents reached out to the school community repeatedly, inviting teachers, and "established" parents, to join durng the 18 months the PTA functioned. The PTA parents got involved with big dreams of making Payne a true neighborhood school, like Maury or Brent, over time. Payne is a 70% OOB school without a single white kid from K on up in a school district that has become majority white.

The entire PTA leadership was voted out in the spring of 2012 and the organization has only existed on paper since. The PTA parents and their children aren't suffering - the kids are all off superior schools for K+. It's the kids left behind who pay.

Something to cheer about?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

This pattern seems to play out again and again. It happened at Frances Stevens a few years ago too. There's got to be a way for families of new studentse who want to help a school to do it without being hated by those who are already there.

To clarify, Payne HAD NO PTA before the "gentrifiers" set one up in 2010. Moreover, the IB parent group setting up the PTA was mixed racially, not just white, but biracial, black and Arab. These parents reached out to the school community repeatedly, inviting teachers, and "established" parents, to join durng the 18 months the PTA functioned. The PTA parents got involved with big dreams of making Payne a true neighborhood school, like Maury or Brent, over time. Payne is a 70% OOB school without a single white kid from K on up in a school district that has become majority white.

The entire PTA leadership was voted out in the spring of 2012 and the organization has only existed on paper since. The PTA parents and their children aren't suffering - the kids are all off superior schools for K+. It's the kids left behind who pay.

Something to cheer about?





Thank you for the explanation. Nope, nothing to cheer about.