Petition to End Discrimination Against Detroit Students
in Ferndale and Other Area Schools
Realizing the Promise of Brown v. Board of Education
in the New Era of Hope
Realizing the Promise of Brown v. Board of Education in the New Era of Hope
For the first time in forty years, Detroit students have the economic and social power to create equal, quality, integrated schools for students throughout the metropolitan Detroit area. Tens of thousands of Detroit students currently attend public charter schools in Ferndale and other suburban school districts, providing these districts with desperately-needed new school revenue. The revenue generated from Detroit students is being used to give Ferndale and other suburban district students, racially-integrated, diverse, college-preparatory educational opportunities, including multiple career-path, art, sports and music programs and Advanced Placement (AP) classes, which are being denied to Detroit students.
Detroit students attending schools in suburban districts, including Ferndale School District, are being placed in intensely racially-segregated, under-resourced schools, stigmatized as Detroiters and denied access to the better suburban public schools they are helping to fund. This exploitation of Detroit students to create the new Jim Crow separate and unequal educational system being implemented in Michigan is illegal, unfair, and discriminatory and can not continue.
Millions of young black, Latina/o, Arab, Asian and progressive white people, filled with the new spirit of hope, desire schools which are integrated and diverse, offer interesting and challenging courses, and in which students are treated with respect and dignity. The right-wing attacks against public education, based on free-market education schemes, the creation of charters schools and segregationist “schools of choice” have done nothing to improve educational opportunity or access for minority students, and have extended the school budget crisis regularly facing Detroit to virtually every school district in Michigan.
Organizing the social power of Detroit-area students, teachers, parents and communities can end the crisis of public education and make the promise of Brown v. Board of Education finally real for Detroit students and students who live in Ferndale and other suburban school districts.
THEREFORE we the undersigned call on the Ferndale School District and the other suburban districts who are instituting two-tier discriminatory educational policies to:
1. Provide the resources needed to raise the level of the suburban schools to be equal to the other public schools in the District. For example, the overwhelmingly black, Detroit student-attended, Ferndale University High School must become equal in all ways to Ferndale High School.
2. Open all the schools in their districts to Detroit students. In Ferndale, Ferndale High School must be open to Detroit students.
3. End their practice of creating separate and unequal segregated educational opportunities for Detroit students, and support equal, quality, integrated educational opportunities for all.
4. Join with Detroit students, parents, teachers, community members and officials to go to Lansing and Washington D.C., to demand increased and equitable funding for all school districts in Michigan.
5. Support the call for a single metropolitan Detroit public educational plan that can end the current state-sponsored system of unplanned, chaotic, market-based patch-work of failing schools and crisis-ridden school districts. A planned tri-county education system is the only rational way to marshal the resources needed to end the cycle of educational cuts, teacher layoffs and yearly budget crises that every individual school district school is currently experiencing, and to create diverse, integrated, high-quality educational opportunities, specialized school programs and innovative educational choices that would benefit every student in the region.