– SIGN THE PETITION –

Realizing the Promise of Brown v. Board of Education in the New Era of Hope

Petition to End Discrimination Against Detroit Students in Ferndale and Other Area Schools

PETICIÓN EN ESPAÑOL SERÁ DISPONIBLE

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, from both public and private sources, is being used to give a growing number of suburban district students racially-integrated, diverse, college–preparatory educational opportunities, including multiple career-paths, 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 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 it cannot 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 treated with respect and dignity. The right-wing attacks against public education, based on free-market education “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 districts.

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 that Detroit students attend to be equal to the other public schools in the district. For example the overwhelmingly black, Detroit student attended Ferndale’s 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 educational 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 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.