Seven days after Joe Hogsett launched his mayoral campaign calling for a return to a spirit of cooperation in Indianapolis, a racially-divisive fiasco has occurred that exemplifies the challenges Hogsett and the legion of other mayoral candidates must face in bridging the problems that plague Indianapolis.
More about Hogsett’s mayoral bid in a bit.
Ominously, the changing leadership of the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) is starting to signal that it plans to be a cold, callous system toward the majority of IPS residents, parents and students.
I’ve been around when IPS made difficult decisions to close schools.
But in my 40 years here – never – never – did any IPS Superintendent or School Board make such a callous, unfeeling decision as they did Nov. 18 when they voted to strip Shortridge Middle and High School from the 722 students currently attending there.
Diane Arnold, Caitlin Hannon, Annie Roof, and sadly, Sam Odle voted to endorse Superintendent Dr. Lewis Ferebee’s decision that basically evicted Shortridge’s students sending them to other schools.
This decision, driven by the whims of elitist northside and downtown whites is cruel, sickening and made African-Americans, Hispanics and also whites whose children and grandchildren attend Shortridge angry and apprehensive.
Shortridge’s middle school students will be scattered to IPS’ many middle schools.
Supt. Ferebee is supposed to be an “aware” educator. But he and his minions ignored the rich legacy of Shortridge, as they unsympathetically ordered that next August, the school’s high schoolers will lose their school identity, spirit, maybe their extracurricular activity opportunities, class ranking and positioning when they’re merged into Arsenal Tech.
Mergers are messy things in business and institutions. Now put a merger in the context of a high school.
High school is a difficult, emotional time for students. Merging one high school culture into another’s requires patience, skill and compassion by school leadership. But IPS’ top brass has flunked this test.
After the vote, Shortridge students who attended the meeting and testified were devastated. I’m told morale at the school the next day was rough.
So what did Supt. Ferebee do? Did he go to Shortridge to visit with students to express concern the day after being told they were losing their school? No, he attended a function at Tech and put it out on Twitter.
It didn’t help that Ferebee openly blasted “community leaders” for “spreading misinformation” at a subsequent community meeting at Shortridge. Remarks that inflamed those attending, including the heads of Indy’s NAACP and Concerned Clergy.
To be fair, this isn’t the first time the Gambold/Shortridge issue surfaced.
Both Dr. Eugene White and Interim IPS Supt. Dr. Peggy Hinckley tried to move Gambold Prep’s International Baccalaureate program into Shortridge.
The IPS Board balked both times and the idea was shelved.
This time, a pliant Ferebee, not understanding the complex historical racial history of Shortridge, the first free high school in the country in 1864, a school that was integrated on day one, signed off on the half-baked scheme.
The rationale to displace 722 students, mostly minorities, was because whites in Meridian/Kessler, Mapleton-Fall Creek and other northside neighborhoods whined that they’d leave IPS if the district didn’t provide “them” with a high quality high school.
Proponents of the scheme, including IPS’ new owner, Stand for Children who bought themselves a school board this election, pushed this canard of white privilege.
But do northside whites comprise the majority of IPS’ white/non-Hispanic enrollment?
Total white enrollment of IPS this school year is 6,078. Total white enrollment of these eleven schools is 1,580; 26 percent of IPS’ total white enrollment.
There’s just 179 white northside IPS seventh and eighth graders; only 122 white northside IPS students of the total.
The majority of IPS’ white enrollment isn’t northside, it’s throughout the rest of the district.
Are Odle, Roof, Hannon and Arnold clamoring for a quality high school in Garfield Park, Irvington, the near southwest side or other neighborhoods where the working class whites that’s IPS’ white majority live? No.
Shortridge was sacrificed on the altar to please the northside/downtown elites.
It’s these types of divisions and decisions done, not for the good of the city, but out of greed, callousness, bigotry, elitism and cruelty that Joe Hogsett is going to have to come to grips with in his quest to be Indianapolis’ 49th Mayor.
Hogsett set the right note for his campaign talking about trying to bring the city back together.
He talked tough yet compassionate about crime. Interviewed on our WTLC-AM (1310) Afternoons with Amos, Hogsett wasn’t just law and order, but said repeatedly, “the best anti-crime program is a job.”
“I’m not coming in to wave a magic wand and immediately solve this city’s problems,” Hogsett told me and listeners.
In our interview, Hogsett was complimentary about his former political adversary Bill Hudnut, saying Hudnut’s style of being Indianapolis’ top cheerleader and working to bring folks together was a style Hogsett’s looking to emulate.
But education will be a major challenge for Hogsett’s campaign. And I don’t mean the pre-K thing.
IPS opening up raw wounds with missteps like the Shortridge debacle is causing potential fissures in the Democratic Party.
The same folks driving the Shortridge mess are the ones helping drive the education reform train. As Hogsett travels around Indianapolis listening and talking, he needs to really understand how fractured this city has become.
Whoever becomes Indy’s next mayor must deal with this sad reality; and try to correct it!
See ‘ya next week!
You can reach Amos Brown at ac-brown@aol.com.
