Blog #4

           I chose to upload a photo that represents the problem of segregation in the schools of Selma. I was very surprised to find that Selma’s private school only consists of 1% minority students, whereas the public school consists of 99% minority students. Not only are their schools not integrated, they’re not even desegregated.  When we watched the RATCO documentary, we learned that, for many of the kids, RATCO is the only time when they play with kids of a different skin color. How sad is it that in 2015 it’s still acceptable to have schools that are so blatantly segregated.

            I’ve had interesting experiences with school integration in my hometown. In Eagan, the elementary school you go to depends on where you live. My elementary school encompassed a lower-income neighborhood and had a much larger percentage of minorities than the surrounding schools. I never thought anything of it until I went to middle school and heard everyone refer to my elementary school as “ghetto”.  My elementary school received the exact funding that the other schools received, and was the exact same model as the others, but the only difference that mine had more minorities.

             Additionally a couple years after I’d left the elementary school, the district was getting into legal trouble because of the radical concentration of all the minorities in a single school. Instead of trying to do a better job at integrating the schools, the district had a different idea. They converted my elementary school into a “magnet school” which meant, legally, it could have a larger number of minorities than the other schools in the area. Racial segregation is present in many different forms all over America.

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