Long ago I was told “with age comes understanding.” As an elder, one who remembers Jim Crow, I have yet to understand the peculiarity of Alexandria’s politics. That City Council cannot lead is a given. That the School Board favors re-segregation is also assumed.
Those who promoted Jefferson Houston School’s $45 million do over should be lashed. Oversized buildings do not education make. Those who ignored then failed to address Superintendent Sherman’s ineffectiveness — I include the current superintendent in the mix — should also be lashed. K-8 is little more than a re-segregation tool.
Superintendent Crawley has yet to prove the K-8 model works. Instead we live in the slip and slide of city chaos. For example, if Lyles Crouch, once a segregated black school, tests in the 90-plus percentile statewide, why is the same curriculum not used at Jefferson Houston? Or Cora Kelly? Black families thread through the hocus pocus knowing Jefferson Houston’s arts focus was never funded.
Alexandria’s Democrats are afraid of change. They are politicians who prefer the status quo, new structures instead of change. Those whose families came with the Great Migration know the segregated public housing of 1942 and shortly after was better because it offered indoor plumbing. What is better about public housing today? In the early public housing years families transitioned out, some able to buy homes in black-only neighborhoods.
According to the 2008 Braddock East Plan public housing was first created during the 1930s to provide decent, safe, and sanitary low-cost housing to predominantly working-class and middle-class households. Today over 83 percent of public housing households are extremely low income. Many are multi-generational.
The party does not want progress. Officeholders want indebted voter classes — low income families satisfied with a world no bigger than ARHA, Jefferson Houston School, and the Charles Houston Center and Central district parents for whom re-segregation is a rallying cry.
The city wants to tax homeowners to pay for public and affordable housing, school expansion and maintenance, and infrastructure. I say no! Why does the new K-8 Jefferson Houston School, accredited in 2008 in an older building, now require a no transfer policy? Why has City Council repeatedly postponed mandatory storm sewer compliance to pay for poorly considered school and housing needs?
If Superintendent Rebecca Perry got Jefferson Houston accredited — less than a decade ago — then why can’t Crawley? If bricks and mortar public housing is demolished, why is ARHA’s replacement housing expected to have a shorter useful life? The list of questions is long.
The manager, mayor and City Council, School Board and superintendent have earned grade F. Last year’s potholes go unfixed. Metro is collapsing. The schools are a continuing saga, there is no end to the immigrant flow. Council must solve the budget problem internally. We will not support another year of tax increases.
Nolan Alexander
Alexandria