Enough!
By Paul Goldman
After 62 years of broken promises by city government leaders to minority kids, the historic Richmond Crusade for Voters says enough is a enough and shakes up Richmond politics.
For weeks now, the Richmond Crusade for Voters, the oldest and most reliably pro-Democratic Civil Rights political group in Richmond, indeed across the Commonwealth, has been battling with City Hall over the future of RVA’s school children.
Ninety (90) percent of Richmond Public School students are minority, most from families with limited means. One out of every four lives at or below the federal poverty line. They go to the oldest, most obsolete, unhealthy facilities in the state, most built in the Segregation Age and known as inferior buildings for schools attended by African-Americans.
Republican Delegate Manoli Loupassi, who represents the wealthiest, most GOP part of RVA, has the honesty to say what Democratic Mayor Stoney, the Richmond City Democratic Party, and every Democratic Delegate and State Senator from Richmond have yet to say publicly:
- The RVA K12 facility situation is immoral and we need a fully-funded system wide school modernization plan etched in stone and guaranteed to be implemented.
- Not some wish list, not some we will do a little now and hopefully something later,
- Not trust me to have something in the future: but a real plan fully funded enacted into law that is guaranteed at a date certain to end this intolerable, immoral situation.
Thus, Loupassi is the only -- the only elected official -- willing to publicly back the School Modernization Charter Change Referendum on the upcoming Nov. 7th election ballot.
The Crusade backs the Referendum because like Loupassi, they are tired of city government leaders’ 62 years of excuses for what has been a constitutionally impermissible situation since the Supreme Court decided the Brown II case in 1955.
Enough already!
The true concrete and steel Monuments To Segregation are these obsolete, moldy, unhealthy, dysfunctional school buildings.
Nov. 7th offers the rarest of political opportunities, a chance for an unprecedented bipartisan voting mandate to end this immoral situation.
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