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Inasmuch as African American News & Issues’ corporate headquarters is located in northwest Houston, Texas’ predominately Black Acres Home community, we fought the same fight that the parents of a majority of the minority students in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) and/or the North Forest School District are now fighting. History records, however, that the same fight was fought in segregated school districts throughout the nation after Brown vs. the Board became the law of the land. In fact, we were part of Acres Home’s twenty five year struggle with Aldine ISD. Even so, many of the community leaders forgot their history and made the same mistake of thinking people in control can be forced to do what’s right.

In hindsight, we mistakenly thought that we had won a war (when a federal mandate forced the AISD to provide an adequate education for minority students), but we had only won a battle and established an uneasy peace. For more on that history, you’ll have to peruse our archives (www.aframnews.com), because lack of space precludes chapter and verse on how the community was duped and now find themselves without a single traditional high school in a dying community that’s forced to bus children to other communities to be educated. But, suffice it to say, closing schools that are the cornerstones of their neighborhoods is the first step that’s taken to reclaim predominately minority neighbors. Don’t just take our word, instead check with anybody you know that comes from a rural community and you’ll learn why they deserted them.

We Must Understand, Black Americans can’t win for losing, if they buy into the inane notion that closing schools in underserved communities and busing them across town to be "better educated." Unless you’re brain-dead, you surely know that traditional high schools always were and always shall be the glue that bonds a people, insofar as they’re the one place everybody in the ‘hood has in common. The best and brightest also share the commonality of having to move to larger cities, insofar as they had nowhere to cast their buckets down in their community. Truth is, even closing schools in big cities are tantamount to stabbing the ‘hood in the heart. Even after schools have been closed, or reduced to Middle, or Elementary school status, you’ll find that class reunions (for grads from a long gone high school) opens old wounds.

Whether the alumnus is successful, or unsuccessful, old and young, they share a suppressed resentment toward their community for not fighting for their schools. There’s a sadness that prevails when they once again become classmates, teammates (on sports teams, or other extracurricular activities), whose accomplishments were the source of their neighborhood’s pride and tradition. If the movie Remember The Titans comes to mind, we’re preaching to the choir. Nevertheless, our kids seem to be faring worse before they were bused to the White folk’s schools. In spite of electing minority board members to oversee schools that our tax dollars fund. Take for instance HISD’s curent minority-majority Board of Trustees that recently voted to leave three schools on life support for another year, although they already have been declared brain-dead.

We Must Understand, downsizing and/or closing schools in underserved neighborhoods has nothing to do with educating our kids. Quite frankly, it’s baffling why Kevin Hoffman is the only board member who realizes that a school isn’t just a school to a community. When you check the board member’s pedigrees, it’s hard to understand why they voted to close the schools. Diana Davila, the board’s president grew up in the East End barrios and has a Master’s in Education Management from UH, so where is she coming from? Greg Myers, who has a private school background, so he just might not get it. But Harvin Moore, who have a Masters from New York University and is known for tutoring at-risk students in Harlem, certainly should know closing schools isn’t the answer.