Matters

Houston ISD school closures are looming due to budget deficits and declining enrollment and a possible fiscal shortcoming of over $200 million. Is now the time to finally do right by Jack Yates and build a true opportunity for equity?

School segregation and undereducation lies at the epicenter of America’s racial inequity and also feeds into housing segregation, which is a major source of the racial wealth gap.

Facts

In 1956, approximately 100 members of Congress signed the “Southern Manifesto” opposing the Supreme Court’s Brown vs Board of Education decision.

Academic Anchor

In 1968, following a judge’s order to integrate, HISD adopted stringent guidelines and of the 22 black first graders who applied only 12 were accepted in the white schools. HISD implemented buses and magnet schools, which decimated local feeder patterns and community. Zone schools were seemingly under-resourced. HISD implemented its Voluntary Interdistrict Education Plan (VIEP) in 1980 to lure non-BIPOC students back from neighboring districts to elite magnet schools and neighborhood students of any ethnicity were led to bus for equitable resources. Although in 1981 the court declared HISD a “unitary” school district, meaning all vestiges of a dual, segregated school system had been eliminated, recent data shows notable inequity in experience based on race.

The Struggle Continues

The Baylor College of Medicine Academy at Ryan, a HISD magnet middle school, now occupies the original Yates campus. In an effort to build true equity and healing, community groups propose a more inclusive usage of 2610 Elgin street. Advocates affirm that visionary leaders and progressive principals such as James D. Ryan, William S. Holland and Michael McKenzie have met great resistance when working to uplift historic Negro academic institutions and most notably HISD schools in Third Ward, TX.