Segregated schools

Students being segregated in Knox County, Tennessee

Knox County School District is segregating students based on who does and doesn’t wear a mask. Parents of Knox County, Tennessee, took to Facebook to call out Knox County School District’s treatment of their students for refusing to wear a mask.

One school of focus has been West Valley Middle School, located in Knoxville. One parent said kids have been bullied by the administration and were told they would have to eat lunch after everyone else since they didn’t want to wear a mask.

Another claimed maskless middle school students were isolated from the rest of their peers. Images started being spread throughout social media of West Valley Middle School students holding up signs on the windows of their isolation room in protest.

Knox County Schools confirmed this segregation Wednesday morning. KCSD said 722 students were isolated from other students, and it wasn’t just middle school students. KCSD spokesperson Carly Harrington said of the 722 students, 207 were elementary students, 235 were middle school students, and 280 were high school students.

This segregation could be illegal under the U.S. Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine when ruling segregation in public schools unconstitutional in 1954.

The Knox County Board of Education had a meeting on Wednesday night to close the controversial day. Masks were not on the agenda for the meeting, which meant speakers were not allowed to bring up masks during the public forum.

Over 60 years ago, in September of 1959, several AfricanAmerican families in Knoxville took a courageous step forward. It had been five years since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which declared segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.

With that in mind, more than a dozen Knoxville students, along with their parents, went to allwhite schools -- including East High, Fulton High and Mountain View Elementary -- and asked to enroll. They were denied because of their race, and that refusal set in motion a lawsuit that eventually led to the desegregation of Knoxville’s schools.