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The state’s largest school district now
has an
all-female board for the first time in
its history.
Four new Houston ISD school board
members were sworn in Thursday afternoon,
joining five current trustees.
The new board is facing a state takeover
of HISD, which a judge temporarily stopped.
“No matter what happens, the elected
board will stay in place,” said new trustee
Judith Cruz of District VIII. “They will
lose voting power, but the elected board
stays in place.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you roll with
what you’ve got,” said new trustee Dr.
Patricia K. Allen of District IV. “As long
as I’m here, I’m going to be working for the
children.”
The new board will also deal with new
campus security concerns after the shooting
death of student Cesar Cortes at Bellaire
High School Tuesday afternoon.
New trustee Kathy Blueford-Daniels lost
her son, Patrick Charles Murphy, to gun
violence in 2006. The 20-year-old was
murdered in a case of mistaken identity.
Trustee Blueford-Daniels took her oath
Thursday on her son’s Bible. She also held a
moment of silence for Cortes after all
trustees had been sworn.
“That’s why it becomes bittersweet,”
said Blueford-Daniels, who represents HISD
District II. “As a mom who’s gone through
this, I understand what the family’s going
through. So my heart is full and heavy and
broken all the same time.”
Blueford-Daniels and other trustees say
safety involves not just board policies, but
also community accountability.
“We need to have mental health
counselors, that kind of thing, but really,
the community needs to speak first, and what
is it that they feel that their school
needs?” Cruz said.
“Maybe working with some of those
children on not being afraid to come
forward,” said Dr. Allen, responding to a
question about specific steps schools could
take. “We all have to work as a group. We
all have to work as a family. That’s
including the children.”
Trustees say because the Bellaire High
School shooting is an ongoing investigation,
it was tough to immediately know what
exactly happened and what specific steps to
take to prevent something similar.
However, in spite of the well-publicized
division on the prior elected board, this
new group promised collaboration with each
other and with the community.
Bloomberg: “My story might have turned out very differently if I had been Black”
CORRECTS THE NAME OF THE CHUCH TO VERNON CHAPEL AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH - Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, left, greets the Rev. Robert Turner, right, during a service at the Vernon Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Tulsa, Okla., Sunday, Jan. 19, 2020. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
Mike Bloomberg is ready to acknowledge his white privilege, and he’s hoping it’ll help him with Black voters.
Why it matters: Bloomberg’s courtship of Black voters appears an uphill climb because of his past support for stop-and-frisk in New York City. He’s seeking to redefine his reputation with Black voters using his biggest strength — an understanding of data and the economy — to present himself as a wealth advocate on their behalf.
“Stop-and-frisk,” a policy for which Bloomberg apologized prior to launching his campaign, is haunting the former New York mayor at a time when race and gender are driving the political conversation.
During his 12-year tenure, “there were millions of street stops heavily targeting Black and brown young men,” per the New York Times.
Now, Bloomberg is facing the impact his own political legacy has had on the Black community.
Driving the news: The former New York mayor gave a speech on the racial wealth gap and economic mobility in Tulsa on Sunday, delivering some of his most honest remarks on race since launching his presidential campaign. Bloomberg’s campaign is also releasing “the Greenwood Initiative,” an economic proposal that aims to address the lasting legacy of discrimination.
What they’re saying: “As someone who has been very lucky in life, I often say my story would only have been possible in America — and that’s true,” Bloomberg said at the Greenwood Cultural Center.
“But I also know that my story might have turned out very differently if I had been Black, and that more Black Americans of my generation would have ended up with far more wealth, had they been white.”
Bloomberg’s team maintains that he’s been aware of his privilege for a long time — because of his experience in New York City and because he’s a data guy familiar with racial disparities — but now he’s talking about it publicly.
Bloomberg’s Greenwood plan combines some of the other ideas we’ve heard from other 2020 Democrats, like investing in Black-owned businesses and stimulating generational wealth for African American families.
A senior adviser for the campaign told reporters that they think what makes his plan different is its “place-based” strategy: The campaign is working to identify 100 communities — mostly in non-white areas — hit hardest by economic and/or racial discrimination.
The adviser also said that Bloomberg supports H.R. 40, a House bill that calls for a commission to study reparations for slavery.
By the numbers: Bloomberg’s team is not yet saying where the money is coming from or how much the full plan will cost.
It proposes $70 billion over 10 years specifically for the 100 communities.
It would also seek to create 1 million new black homeowners, which a senior adviser said would get the country back to 2003 numbers — the last time Black homeownership rates were still climbing.
The plan would double the number of Black-owned businesses, to 100,000, and seek to increase median household income for Black families by one-third.
It would also invest an initial $10 billion for the creation of a Housing Fairness Commission.
“For Black Americans, there was nothing that white landowners, businesses, banks, and politicians might not take: Their wages and their homes, their businesses and their wealth, their votes and their power, and even their lives,” Bloomberg said in his speech.
Tulsa was known as “Black Wall Street” because it had several prominent and successful black-owned business, until race riots in 1921 destroyed the area and these businesses.
“What happened here in Tulsa demonstrates in incredibly stark relief the violent destruction of a prosperous black community and the enormous obstacles that so many black Americans have faced not only in creating wealth, but in passing down assets to their children and grand-children as generations of white families have done,” Bloomberg said.
Between the lines: Bloomberg is running a non-traditional campaign with an eye toward general election states rather than the early voting states. But so far, the campaign has been less clear on how to earn the support of African American voters.
Bloomberg is currently polling at 4% among African American voters in the Democratic primary. Since 1992, no Democratic candidate for president has become the party nominee without earning a majority of the black vote.
The big question: Will Bloomberg continue the conversation on racial discrimination past MLK weekend? If so, he’ll have to continue processing the legacy of “stop-and-frisk” in public and in real time.
An Old Man
Lived in the Village
An old man
lived in the village. The whole village was tired of
him; he was always gloomy, he constantly complained
and was
always in a bad mood. The
longer he lived, the viler he became and more
poisonous were his words. People did their best to
avoid him because his misfortune was contagious. He
created the feeling of unhappiness in others.
But one day,
when he turned eighty, an incredible thing happened.
Instantly everyone started hearing the rumor: “The
old man is happy today, he doesn’t complain about
anything,
smiles, and even his face is
freshened up.”
The whole
village gathered around the man and asked him, “What
happened to you?”
The old
man replied, “Nothing special. Eighty years I’ve
been chasing happiness and it was useless. And then
I decided to live without happiness and just enjoy
life. That’s why I’m happy now.”
Moral of the story: Don’t chase happiness.
Enjoy your life.
The smaller the Club the Bigger the
Party!
Come out relax and enjoy the
sounds of DJ Chatterbox. Click
on picture below to see who's up
in the club.
S marks King holiday amid fears of deep racial divisions
To commemorate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Nicholas Thomas and more than 100 other volunteers will board up vacant houses, install school safety signs and make other improvements to a Detroit neighborhood. Their mission is to celebrate King’s legacy by being good neighbors and helping lift up a primarily black school in one of the poorer areas of the city.
As Thomas fans out across the neighborhood with hammer and nails, King’s legacy of peace and racial and social justice will be foremost in his mind. But at the same time, he’s struggling to come to grips with the deep racial divisions roiling the nation under President Donald Trump.
“Dr. King wanted unity. We have Trump separating immigrants … the wall,” said the 19-year-old Thomas who is black.
As the nation marks the holiday honoring King, the mood surrounding it is overshadowed by deteriorating race relations in an election season that has seen one candidate of color after another quit the 2020 presidential race.
Two black candidates — U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker — and the lone candidate of Hispanic ancestry, former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, have dropped out of the Democratic race for the White House.
“That scares me a lot,” said Deja Hood, 21, of Chicago, a senior at Eastern Michigan University. “Who is going to really back our voicing? You can’t understand a minority if you’ve never been in a minority situation. Even though you can advocate for us all day, you could never understand the issues we go through on a daily basis.”
Booker, Harris and Castro struggled with raising money and with polling. Asian American entrepreneur Andrew Yang, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Samoan American, and black former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick remain in the race but are not considered top contenders for the Democratic nomination.
The front-runners in the field are all white men and women.
“It’s disappointing, but really not surprising. You look at it and think, ‘damn, now what?'” said Xavier Cheatum, 22, an African American senior at Eastern Michigan who along with Hood is participating in King events on the school’s Ypsilanti campus, west of Detroit.
People have the right to be — and should be — concerned about the state of race relations and the way people of color, in particular, are being treated, said Jill Savitt, president of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta.
“What we’re seeing right now, it’s very public and people are showing their hatred openly, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,” Savitt said. “There is a coming realization in our country. We have to come to a reckoning about our past and the truth about our history from slavery to the lynching era to Jim Crow. Only with real honesty about our situation can we come to some reconciliation and move on to fulfill King’s hope and dream of a real, peaceful multicultural democracy.”
It doesn’t help when elected leaders don’t — or are slow to — stand against hate and intolerance, she added.
Trump referred last year to a predominantly African American congressional district that includes Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” During a 2018 immigration conversation in the Oval Office, he disparaged Haiti and some African countries with coarse language.
And following a 2017 clash between white nationalist demonstrators and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” and that there was ” blame on both sides.” One anti-racism activist was killed.
In 2018, there were more than 7,000 single-bias incidents reported by law enforcement, according to FBI hate crime statistics. More than 53% of the offenders were white, while 24% were black. Nearly 60% of the incidents involved race, ethnicity and ancestry.
“Racism has long been a way for people to maintain their power,” Savitt said. “Manipulating people’s fears and anxieties is the way you do that. The Trump administration has certainly fanned the flames.”
Trump is trying to court black voters, knowing that he isn’t likely to win them over en masse but could chip into Democratic advantages if he wins more black support in critical swing states. His campaign has stepped up outreach efforts, including to African Americans and Latinos, marking a departure from 2016 when Trump’s volunteer “National Diversity Coalition” struggled to make an impact.
The campaign already has spent more than $1 million on black outreach, including radio, print and online advertising in dozens of markets since the coalition’s launch, the campaign has said.
Only 6% of African American voters went for Trump in the 2016 election, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Trump’s message to black voters in that campaign was: “What have you got to lose?” Supporters now say they have a record to point to, including the low black unemployment rate and investments in historically black colleges and universities.
A Washington Post-Ipsos poll of African Americans in early January found that 90% disapprove of Trump’s job performance and 83% say Trump is racist.
Laying it all in Trump’s lap is unfair, said Carol Swain, an advisory board member to the national Black Voices for Trump.
“With Trump, he has pushed the American nationalist identity that I think tamps down the kind of conflicts we would have,” said Swain, who is black and has taught political science at Vanderbilt and Princeton universities. “He has pushed patriotism over race and that benefits our country.”
Faith Morris, chief marketing and external affairs officer for the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, doesn’t see it that way.
“It’s definitely a white America. A black America. A Hispanic America,” Morris said. “And there’s a very broken line that connects the different Americas. In 2020, we still feel the oppressive issues that Dr. King fought against. He focused on the same things we’re focusing on now.”
Jacob Sklarsky recently read a book about King and the civil rights movement to students in his second-grade Chicago Public Schools class.
“To look at the faces of young black kids who are sometimes hearing about this history for the first time, they are distressed by it,” said Sklarsky, who is white and a member of KAM Isaiah Israel, a Jewish congregation in Chicago.
“They were very relieved at the end because, in a way, it was all worth it,” Sklarsky said. “It gives us some hope, but it’s also very sad that we’re not anywhere near what King dreamed of.”
Rollback proposed for
Michelle Obama school
lunch guidelines
The Trump administration
on Friday took another step
toward dismantling Michelle
Obama’s school nutrition
guidelines, proposing a new
rule that could lead to more
pizza and fries and less
fruit and a smaller variety
of vegetables on school
menus.
Agriculture Secretary
Sonny Perdue, who announced
the rule changes on Obama’s
birthday, said they were
needed to give schools more
flexibility and reduce waste
while still providing
nutritious and appetizing
meals.
But child nutrition
advocates saw it
differently.
“What a shameless,
embarrassing capitulation to
lobbyists at the expense of
American children and their
well-being,” said Sam Kass,
who served as executive
director of Obama’s “Let’s
Move” campaign to combat
child obesity. ”This country
— and its kids — deserve so
much better. ”
Under the proposal,
schools would be allowed to
cut the amount of certain
types of vegetables served
at lunch, and legumes
offered as a meat
alternative also could be
counted as part of the
vegetable requirement.
Potatoes could be served as
a vegetable.
The proposal also would
allow schools to reduce the
amount of fruit at on-the-go
breakfast served outside the
cafeteria.
Gay Anderson, president
of the School Nutrition
Association, said that while
the nutrition standards had
been a success overall, some
requirements led to reduced
participation in the
program, higher costs and
waste.
“USDA’s school meal
flexibilities are helping us
manage these challenges and
prepare nutritious meals
that appeal to diverse
student tastes,” Anderson
said in a statement.
The school meals program
serves about 30 million
students, most of them from
low-income families.
“The Trump
administration’s assault on
children’s health continues
today under the guise of
‘simplifying’ school meals,”
Colin Schwartz, the Center
for Science in the Public
Interest’s deputy director
for legislative affairs,
said in a statement.
The proposal would give
schools greater flexibility
in offering entrees for a la
carte purchases, which
Schwartz said would “create
a huge loophole in school
nutrition guidelines, paving
the way for children to
choose pizza, burgers,
French fries, and other
foods high in calories,
saturated fat or sodium in
place of balanced school
meals every day.”
Geraldine Henchy,
director of nutrition policy
at the Food Research &
Action Center, said the
bottom line should be
nutrition, but the revisions
to the a la carte rule would
result in students getting
“a lot more fats, a lot more
sodium, a lot more
calories.”
Specifically, the
proposal would reduce the
amount of red and orange
vegetables that would have
to be offered every day at
lunch.
For breakfasts taken to
go, fruit servings could be
reduced from a cup to half a
cup.
Rep. Bobby Scott, a
Virginia Democrat and
chairman of the House
Committee on Education and
Labor, said the proposal
“threatens the progress
we’ve made toward improving
nutrition in schools.”
“For many children, the
food they eat at school is
their only access to
healthy, nutritious meals,”
he said.
The American Heart
Association said the rule
would “put children’s health
at risk.”
“Healthy school meals
help combat childhood
obesity and poor
cardiovascular health, but
they also help establish a
foundation for a lifetime of
healthy behaviors,” the
group said.
As first lady, Obama
championed healthier school
meals as part of the “Let’s
Move” campaign.
“With one in three of
our kids on track to have
diabetes, it’s
unconscionable that the
Trump administration would
do the bidding of the potato
and junk food industries,”
Kass said.
The 2010 Health,
Hunger-Free Kids Act set
nutrition standards for
school meals, requiring
schools to offer fruits and
vegetables and more
whole-grain foods and to
limit calories, fat and
sodium.
The proposed rule is the
second move by the Trump
administration to scale back
the school lunch program’s
nutrition standards. Under a
2018 rule, the
administration reduced the
whole grains that had to be
served and allowed low-fat
chocolate milk. Before the
rule change, only fat-free
flavored milk was permitted.
Perdue announced the
proposed changes in San
Antonio, Texas.
“Schools and school
districts continue to tell
us that there is still too
much food waste and that
more common-sense
flexibility is needed to
provide students nutritious
and appetizing meals,” he
said.
The agency also proposed
changes to the summer meals
program, which serves 2.6
million children.
