On Terry Grier....

Well, before you read the main body, an intro would be helpful. Before the beginning of the 2004-2005 school year, the Guilford County school board, headed by the magnificent superintendent Terry Grier, decided that in order to spice up the three high schools in my city (as well as try to get them to have better scores so the board could get a bigger paycheck), they would implement the High Point Choice Plan. This 'Choice Plan' involved letting rising freshmen write what their 1st 2nd and 3rd choices of school were, putting their names into a computer in California, and letting it randomly choose a school for them. Example: I live about 10 minutes from Southwest High. Walking. Slowly. You can hear the cheers from football games on Friday nights. And yet, they chose Central (a ghetto school) for me! It is 15 minutes away on the fastest Ferrari. Speeding. No traffic lights. Makes sense, right? In any case, I managed to get into Southwest through a series of letters, petitions, and appeals. It took the board two years to figure out that the plan didn't work, so they came up with a new map before this year started, once again diregarding protests entirely and coming up with a gerrymandered map that didn't follow neighborhood schools at all. This time, I fell (barely) within the Southwest district, but it struck me as unfair to other people. That's what this speech is about.



I was recently present at one of the many school board meetings which have been plaguing our county for the past couple of years. The various speakers there had petitions pleading for the board to drive away the infestation. As is quite clearly obvious, they did not pay attention.

At this meeting, one of the speakers mentioned one of the school board’s own ‘policies,’ so called. This particular policy, policy JB-CC, required that taxpayer’s money be used as economically as possible by: 1) efficiently utilizing the money given for transport, and 2) anticipating the needs of growing areas and preparing for new schools to ‘come online,’ supporting them in every which way. Have they done this? As is quite clearly obvious, they did not.

First off, it is ‘required’ that the already small amount of money set aside for schools and transportation is used resourcefully. The manifest thing to do is to bus as many people as far as humanly possible. Or at least to the board it is. The High Point Lottery Plan, as it should rightly be called, exploited this money vacuum to the greatest possible extent, taking advantage of traffic and high gas prices. Now, they decided to change it so that they only take half the people in the city to the other side of town. Were they being thrifty in any way? As is quite clearly obvious, they were not.

The second part of the equation involves adding new schools. This hasn’t happened for ten years and will not happen for another year or two. It should have happened long ago, since it is evident that High Point is growing, especially in the northern areas. Southwest High School has 29 outside classrooms. Twenty-nine! It had to get all the way up to twenty and nine for them to realize the school needed to be expanded. The school is so crowded that there are 4 lunches, all of them so full many people sit outside or in the hallways. And when it’s raining… In any case, the construction that should have happened long ago is only now beginning. And that’s just Southwest. High Point Central is crowded. Andrews is even more crowded. And there are more students coming in every year! So, since High Point is crowded, crowded, crowded, the manifest thing to do is to build a school in northern Guilford, with, might I add, has the creative name of ‘Northern Guilford’. (That’s another thing they’re not very good at: naming schools. Let’s see. There’s Northeast, Northwest, Northern, Western, Southwest, Southeast, Southern, and Central. Brilliant!) Now, don’t get me wrong, the northern part of the county is growing, but not nearly as much as High Point is. And even those schools were not anticipated, as they should have been, but are coming in almost too late. Was the board at all prepared beforehand? As is quite clearly obvious, they were not.

Now, the new map has been approved, despite dozens of petitions and thousands of signatures, going against what the people want. Popular sovereignty is supposed to be the power here, not the board. The people should be able to receive what they want, what they need. The people should be able to choose where they want to live and, subsequently, where they want their kids to go to school. The people of this county should not be disregarded so readily. But, of course, the majority of the board members is blind to this and is sucking in the entire community into their black hole of meaninglessness, of naïveté, of plain old stupidity. And do we have a choice in the matter? We should, but as is quite clearly obvious, we don’t.

The new map has the very interesting feature of disregarding neighborhood schools almost entirely and, as I stated before, of sending students halfway across the city, forcing them to be picked up at such ungodly times as 7 am, so we can be at school at 8:30. An hour and a half on the bus! It’s insane! (They apparently have not heard that Gerrymandering is illegal.) The plan is supposed to ‘diversify’ our school settings and make them better. Frankly, it does neither. It’s not necessary to send people across the city to introduce a range of peoples. Just on my street, let alone my neighborhood, there are Mexicans, Chinese, Koreans, Poles, African-Americans, Caucasians, Hindus, Irish, and who knows what else. If that’s not diversity, I don’t know what is. Besides, the ‘bettering’, so called, is actually making our schools worse. Scores went down in all three schools since the Choice Plan was implemented. That’s what I call [anti-]progress!

But what can we do about the mess that has become our school system? Technically, a lot, but sadly, in reality, we have to go along with the bullheadedness of it all. The plague brought upon us by Terry Grier and his minions will keep on growing