Nine black children attending Red River Elementary School were directed last week to the back of the school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children.
The situation has outraged relatives of the black children who have filed a complaint with school officials.
Superintendent Kay Easley will meet with the family members in her office this morning.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also is considering filing a formal charge with the U.S. Department of Justice. NAACP District Vice President James Panell, of Shreveport, said he would apprise Justice attorneys of the situation this week. He's considering asking for an investigation into the bus incident and other aspects of the school system's operations, including pupil-teacher ratio as it relates to the numbers of white and black children, along with a breakdown of the numbers of black and white teachers employed....
The astounding thing is not so much that it occurred -- you wonder what planet that bus driver was living on to think that she could do this and not get called on it -- but that it occurred twice.
...After Richmond and Williams filed complaints with the School Board, Transportation Supervisor Jerry Carlisle asked Davis to make seat assignments for her passengers, Sessoms said. "But she still assigned the black children to the back of the bus," she added. And the nine children had to share only two seats, meaning the older children had to hold the younger ones in their laps.
A new solution reached Monday by School Board officials has a black bus driver driving across town to pick up the nine black children....
Hmph.
To be honest, if I had been in that position, I'd have gotten another white driver to take the route, with explicit instructions to let the children choose their own seats, if that was normal practice, or to mix up seat assignments if assigning seats was the normal practice. I do think that, in this particular situation, it would have been good to make the point, for very young children, that this was just one bad person.
Then again, maybe using a black driver was the best way to restore trust for both children and parents -- although I do not think that, under these circumstances, having the children bussed separately is a particularly good idea.
But for a truly impressive view of your fellow human being, read the comments that appear below the article. Really, some of them are just quite quite wonderful people.
Posted by iain at August 25, 2006 03:28 PM
