Ruby Sinreich's blog

Newly minted county commissioner (and former Chapel Hill Town Council member) Penny Rich just sent a letter (quoted in its entirety below) to Chapel Hill mayor Mark Kleinschmidt. In it she takes strong exception to the behavior of Chapel Hill Planning Board chair Del Snow, who attended a county commissioners meeting last month to speak against the implementation of the Orange County transit plan. (See OP's live coverage of the meeting and discussion of the transit vote.)

While I wholeheartedly share Penny's concerns about Del misrepresenting the town, her call for the town to remove Del from the Planning Board will probably provoke a defensive response about municipal sovereignty, which will make it politically difficult for the town to actually do anything about it. Frankly I'm even more bothered that someone in a position of planning leadership such as Del is working to undermine the large-scale community transportation planning that is so critical to our future. Either way I'd like to see some new leaders on the Planning Board, preferably who appreciate both planning and process. But only the Chapel Hill Town Counil can make that happen.

Mark Dorosin - who is the managing director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, a father of three, and a recently sworn-in in Orange County Commissioner - has written a letter to the Chapel Hill Carrboro School Board about the current school reassignment discussion. I couldn't agree with him more about the thinly veiled racism in the sudden clamor for "community schools." A term which is still fully tainted by the Republican takeover of the Wake County School Board, and rings hollow in suburban Chapel Hill where almost no schools are realistically walkable.

“Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will learn to live together.”  Thurgood Marshall

Dear Chairperson Brownstein and Members of the Board of Education:

As you begin to discuss the various redistricting options, I urge you to make racial and socio-economic diversity the highest priority in the redistricting criteria under consideration.  As the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board, like its peers across the state, continues to work to improve student achievement and close the gap between white and minority students’ test scores, it is critical that every available resource be utilized.  These resources include, in addition to technology, books and high quality teachers, students and families. Extensive social science research demonstrates that students learn from their peers, and that racial and socio-economic diversity among students enhances that learning.   All students, regardless of their individual socio-economic status or race, achieve at higher levels in socio-economically diverse schools.