Late into last night, there erupted at the bottom of Schutze's Tuesday post -- concerning the Dallas Independent School District board's threat to needlessly gut the magnets and learning centers -- a discussion about "commitments and covenants." Those are what the district adopted in '03 to get out from under Judge Barefoot Sanders's desegregation order -- and the very things that are in place to keep the district from doing to the magnets and learning centers what Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and board president Jack Lowe want to do at tomorrow's board meeting.
The consensus among the Friends of Unfair Park is that the committments and covenants haven't expired, as Hinojosa insists in making his case for the cuts. Board trustee Carla Ranger also agrees -- to the point where, this morning, she posted to her invaluable blog an item headlined "Will Dallas ISD commit fraud upon the court?" She writes, in part:
What Dallas ISD is about to do appears to be fraud upon the federal court that released it from supervision in 2003.Ranger suggests the deseg case may have to be reopened -- or, maybe, "an independent lawsuit [should be] filed to seek a federal court review of the actions now being taken to destroy all special programs. To which Schutze responds, "The most practical legal recourse may actually be a petition drive to force a recall election for the entire board." Except Ranger, of course.
We have seen this before with the Trustee term extensions. Certain lawyers tell certain Board members and Superintendent Hinojosa what they hope to hear.
This is a destructive agenda that is not progressive at all. It is an agenda grounded in the most extreme self-serving notions.
