At a recent Jefferson County School Board meeting, reform-minded member John Newkirk recounted a conversation he recently had with an African-American woman at the district’s Diversity Day. The woman told Newkirk how, when she was growing up in the South, schools were unequally funded based on the skin color of students.
Newkirk’s reaction was that unequal funding of public schools within a given district is wrong everywhere, and that the woman’s story was “almost a metaphor” for the unequal funding of Jeffco charter schools compared to traditional K-12 public schools.
He added that treating people differently because of skin color “was so foreign to me … it just made me shake my head and go, ‘what were they thinking?’ “
Newkirk’s unobjectionable statement would have had liberals nodding their heads in agreement if it had been made by anybody other than a pro-reform member of the Jeffco School Board.
Yet, rather than agree that unequal funding is a problem, board member Jill Fellman called for Newkirk to apologize.
Since the board’s liberals, including Fellman, represent the union and not your children, they are ever alert for any mention of a black or Hispanic person by a (white) conservative.
Therefore, Fellman predictably whined that Newkirk’s “comparison was very hard for me to hear.” Her crocodile tears of pandering continued regarding “the incredible deep hate” of the pre-civil rights South as if Newkirk’s comments related to anything other than education funding.
And so, Fellman continued: “I would bet that there are some … African-Americans that (would take) deep offense to what he said … . An apology might be appropriate there.”
What does Fellman, who has spent several decades in the Jeffco teachers union-dominated education establishment (after studying math at Notre Dame), know about the sensitivities of African-Americans?
Black parents — especially black women, since a distressingly high percentage of black kids are born to single moms — are sensitive about smug white liberals who care more about protecting union coffers than supporting better education for all of the district’s children, something that the more naïve among us might have expected school board members to consider their highest duty.
Black liberal pundit Juan Williams has called school choice the “civil rights issue of this generation” and challenged Democrats “to stop favoring unions (and) start favoring what’s best for our kids.”
“The unions hate charter schools because they provide parents with an option to remove their children from the bad public schools that are staffed by their members,” he wrote.
Few people exemplify that fact better than Fellman, who has consistently opposed closing the roughly $900 per student funding shortfall at Jeffco’s public charter schools compared to traditional public schools. The reform-minded majority closed roughly $700 of that amount last year over her objection, and aims to close the rest this year.
Data show that charter students — just under 12 percent of all K-12 public school enrollment in the state — are 45.9 percent minorities, about half a percent higher than in traditional public schools. Black students represent about the same percentage of the traditional K-12 student population as in the state’s overall population, but their participation in charter schools is nearly 130 percent of their share of the population. Moms — black and otherwise — want their kids out of the union-run schools that are failing them.
I believe it is Fellman who owes Jeffco parents and students of all races an apology for insisting on underfunding charter schools.
Ross Kaminsky is host of “The Ross Kaminsky Show” on Saturday mornings on 850 KOA.
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