{"id":2093,"date":"2011-05-02T22:56:55","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T02:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/some-reasons-our-members-oppose-unification-leigh-touchton.html"},"modified":"2011-05-02T22:56:55","modified_gmt":"2011-05-03T02:56:55","slug":"some-reasons-our-members-oppose-unification-leigh-touchton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/some-reasons-our-members-oppose-unification-leigh-touchton.html","title":{"rendered":"Some reasons our members oppose unification —Leigh Touchton"},"content":{"rendered":"Leigh Touchton, president of the\nValdosta-Lowndes NAACP<\/a>,\nresponds to\na comment by Jon Parris.<\/a> I’ve appended a clarification. -jsq\n
\nI can describe some reasons our members oppose unification.\n
    \n
  1. \nWe believe VBOE has discriminated against black students with\nalternative school referrals.\n
  2. \nWe believe VBOE has discriminated against black teachers in hiring,\nfiring, promotions and demotions. I can’t describe the details of personal\ncases, but last year when the RIF directive came down, nearly 60% of\nthose fired were black, and black professionals only represent 20-25%\nof the employees.\n
  3. \nThe VBOE system is over 70% black students, yet the black students\nare not given equal opportunities to achieve. I can describe issues\nwe brought to the Department of Justice, as well as issues about the\nAlternative school, and a very serious issue about how the Alternative\nschool was given a different school code, which we believe was a ploy to\nartificially inflate the test scores at the students’ home schools. We\nhave evidence that we gave to the DOJ that students were sent to PLC\nbased on minor infractions.\n
  4. \nMany of our members went through the consolidation in the sixties and\ndon’t want to see their children put into a situation where they will be\neven more of a minority. Our children are in the majority at Valdosta\nCity Schools, but yet we still fight serious issues of discrimination\nand inequality in education.\n
  5. \nMany of us attended the CUEE education session at Serenity Church,\nand did not hear anything that changed our minds.\n
  6. \nMany of us distrust an “education” initiative brought forth from\nthe Chamber of Commerce. Our branch is a member of the Chamber, and we\nsupport Chamber events and some policies, but we don’t support this\none. I can’t remember a time when “business” thought it knew what\nwas best for education except when school privatization was going on,\nand the studies indicated that there was no benefit to that direction\ninsofar as student achievement.\n<\/ol>\nMr. Parris and Mr. Rowell, come to some of our branch meetings and we’ll\nbe glad to talk to you about it, so you can hear directly from us, I\nam unable to completely explain the many different opinions that were\npresented at the branch meeting when this came up for a vote. Also,\na former teacher named Dr. Marilyn McCluskey has written about many of\nthe issues we were involved in, and these descriptions can be found at\nher blog TheNakedTruth4U.\n

    \n-Leigh Touchton\n<\/blockquote>\nNote it was\n\nAlex Jones<\/a>\nwho commented on this blog today; I’m pretty sure Alex Rowell has\na different opinion.\n

    \n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leigh Touchton, president of the Valdosta-Lowndes NAACP, responds to a comment by Jon Parris. I’ve appended a clarification. -jsq I can describe some reasons our members oppose unification. We believe VBOE has discriminated against black students with alternative school referrals. We believe VBOE has discriminated against black teachers in hiring, firing, promotions and demotions. I […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,40,1376,15,19,2951,21,22,3,1106,332],"tags":[2113,512,1872,1636,8829,8705,8701,7,8863,8711,8860,1635,6],"class_list":["post-2093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-community","category-cuee","category-education","category-history","category-naacp","category-planning","category-politics","category-transparency","category-vboe","category-vlcoc","tag-board-of-education","tag-chamber-of-commerce","tag-civil-rights","tag-consolidation","tag-cuee","tag-education","tag-georgia","tag-lowndes-county","tag-naacp","tag-planning","tag-sclc","tag-unification","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-xL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}