Seattle Racism and Classism

I feel for you, Lorax. I know that you have your heart to the pulse of what is happening in your community and these weird closures and moves seem just plain wrong! I used to clean houses for the upper middle class in Seattle ten years ago. Few of them sent their children to public school. The few whose children were in public school-when their child hit junior high, there was no question; on to private. For years I heard about the state of SPS's; bad schools plagued with busing/choice schools, not getting your 'local' school', then back to local availability but not in the class you wanted, etc. It just all seemed like whining to me. Seattle, the place where people can't seem to agree on anything. Transportation, maybe. Monorail, maybe. Decent schools, maybe. Pleasing everyone means no on is pleased.

I moved here during HS from East Coast. I lived in Kitsap county . But, I remember in the early 80's Seattle was a collection of very distinct neighborhoods. You just didn't go to the CD unless you knew someone of color. I moved into some squatty apartment on Summit in Cap.Hill and it was a roach infested run down. So much of the city was crumbling. Poverty seeped in from below 15th over to MLK to Rainer and on. Dangerous things happened on 23rd and Yesler. 'The Facts' newspaper catered to Blacks and the White people kept to themselves. Literally.

There is a long suffering upper mid class thing going on in this area. Despite the hipster cool folk who live around now, I imagine a lot of parents to be children of the separate mentality who can't help but be NIMBY's. Seattle has always been pretty dang White. The power of the people. You are right to feel that there is racism unspoken of. That's how folks do it around here. It's called passive aggressive. They'll hint all around at what they really feel but Never put a name to it.

Personally, I'm glad there are folks like you and LE in the trenches willing to speak the truth. They need it. Me, I'd rather go where the neighborhood school is what is happening. Even in Northshore, the 75 kids my dyad caters to are diverse with 34 having one or more parent born in another country who are bi or tri-lingual. It's not perfect in Nshore. But sometimes, as with SPS, I wonder if it is the highly educated parents and school board who just don't know who to please. I don't know. I just wonder.

Classism? Racism?

Something I am grappling with is the move of Seattle Schools' Lowell APP program to Thurgood Marshall and Hawthorne. The move is from Capital Hill to the South end, and from a building that is 68% white to predominately people of non-white backgrounds. Two things strike me, and I am having trouble understanding:

First: One of the criteria looked at in moving the program is that, if in a building with general ed students, the building should look mirror the demographics of the program in socioeconomic status and background. Hmmm...

Second: I've been reading other blogs, as well as watching the news, and there is this sort of "I wouldn't send my kids there" mentality. They don't necessarily mind moving, but not to either of those schools. I will drop any pretense around understanding school closures, as I haven't been there, so I grapple...

The way I am making sense of it is be smelling the classism and racism in the air. What will happen to the APP kids in a predominately African American building? Is that bad for them? I thought we valued diversity, so I am a bit stumped. If they don't want their kids to go there because they fear the black kids, then say it. Let's call a spade, a spade and stop dancing around. I'm appalled and really angry. I've done after school programming in the Hawthorne building, and the kids are great. Instead they are maligned as inferior to APP kids, and should be avoided.. oh wait, that is the building to avoid, not the kids. They won't say that either... I'm stark raving mad.