Pedro's Memo: Rezoning Plan Racially Motivated
Foes of rezoning Nashville’s schools are trying to torpedo the plan with the 11th-hour release of a scathing memo from former superintendent Pedro Garcia. In the memo, written in January six days before Garcia resigned, he accuses board chair Marsha Warden of shoving him out as schools director because he opposed the rezoning plan and saw it as a re-segregation of schools. He says Warden was succumbing to political pressure to remove black students from schools in Hillwood, which she represents.
“I know that the situation I find myself in today, and the pressure exerted upon me by Marsha Warden, is the direct result of my decision to fight against her desire to move the African American children from the Hillwood cluster so she could be re-elected,” Garcia wrote. “Unfortunately, this is a racially charged issue. I took the stand to oppose re-segregating the district. It was the right stand and I would do it again.”
Warden responded by phone to Pith. “This is no more racially motivated than the man in the moon,” she says, pointing out that she decided against seeking another term in next month’s elections.
“I doubt the veracity of this memo, OK? … Isn’t it really funny that this has just come out right before we’re voting. Isn’t this really odd?"
More from the memo: Garcia writes that on Dec. 12, after he came out against the rezoning plan, Warden told him in a meeting “that my coming evaluation would be very bad for me and I ought to do everything possible to avoid it. I again said what I always have said, ‘I am not afraid of my evaluation. I consider the evaluation to be a tool for improvement.’
“After my comments, Marsha Warden added, ‘You have lost the confidence of the mayor, the confidence of the Chamber and the confidence of the Board. You need to leave.’”
The school board is scheduled to vote tomorrow on the rezoning plan despite growing opposition from NAACP, among other groups. Garcia’s memo was written to Ed Kindall, a black school board member who chose to make it public today.
The plan, hailed by proponents as a return to neighborhood schools, would stop the busing of hundreds of black children from North Nashville to Hillwood and Hillsboro. Instead, they’d go closer to home in the Pearl-Cohn cluster of schools. Advocates say it would let the district run more economically, saving almost $5 million a year.
“We can pay for bricks and mortar and transportation, or we can pay for kids’ education,” Warden says. “We’ve been chastised by two city mayors to do something with our capacity and do better with kids.”
Update: Garcia writes that he decided to oppose the rezoning plan after visiting Brookmeade Elementary School, which is scheduled to close. Teachers told the superintendent that the school should stay open because they said white students then attending private schools would return if black children were sent elsewhere.
"The faculty, after some conversations about the proposal, indicated they believed the school did not need to close," Garcia says. "They believed that after the black students presently attending Blackmeade Elementary were moved to Metro Center as the student assignment plan recommended, many white families would come back to the school. The faculty, in general, indicated the school would be full of white students presently attending private schools. After that meeting, I considered the implications of the plan."
The memo reveals a seemingly bitter Garcia struggling to understand why he was being forced out of office. Of Warden, he writes: "She had tried to intimidate me."
On rezoning: "The agenda clearly became to have a student assignment plan that pushed for neighborhood schools. In essence, a neighborhood school plan is a disguised re-segregation plan."
On his ouster: "Unfortunately it was just an issue of meanness. ... My tenure at MNPS should not have ended this way. I always tried to be professional. I always did what I thought was the right thing. I was true to my values. I just disagreed with some board members about how to assign students to schools. There was no need to become mean and intimidating. I do not know why they chose this course of action. Perhaps, they thought they could bully me. I do not know why people sometimes behave the way they do."
Comments
Does Garcia really think he would have stayed in Nashville as a popular superintendent if not for zoning? If so, he has lost his mind. The reasons for his ouster have been fully supported by the findings of the state - a culture of fear and intimidation, poor management, and a plethora of other problems. This memo sounds like nothing more than an attempt to do a last minute recharacterization of himself as a champion of minority students - something he never much bothered with when he was running MNPS - and try to bolster his "legacy." Dear Lord, please tell me Pith isn't going to start proppping this man up.
Posted 07/07/2008 at 05:45:37 PMJeff, thank you for giving this issue some coverage. I fear the re-zoning (i.e. re-segregation) plan of Metro schools has not receivied enough attention. I am sure there are many well intentioned people supporting the plan, but the end result, whether intended or not, will be the re-segregation of Nashville's public schools. A brief examination of the history of busing, the rise of private schools, and racial history in Nashville reveals the very probable backward step we are taking if we support this plan (or at least if we support it without first taking more time to examine the implications for the racial makeup of our public schools). Please encourage your school board member to vote against this plan!
One other note: I find it interesting that Warden acknowledged the role of the Chamber in deciding how to and who should run our public schools. This bothers me, if for no other reason than the fact that the Chamber wields so much influence but is not subject to oh, I don't know, what would you call it....a public vote! All the more reason to support two well qualified candidates for school baord this August against the Chamber's hand pick opponnents. Vote for Ed Kindall and William Mason! Both are excellent representatives of our community and are much more committed to our public schools than their Chamber-picked opponents (Kindall has served on the board for many years and Mason is a teacher in public school with his children in the system).
Posted 07/07/2008 at 05:54:54 PM1. If Garcia thinks the plan is bad, it's probably good.
2. If Kindall thinks the plan is bad, I know it's good.
3. No one cares what Marsha Warden thinks.
I'm not a fan of parts of this plan, but its better than nothing. And considering that only 30% of our kids are not free and reduced lunch, I don't see how there's enough of them to spread around to do any segregation plan right. The truth is the majority of our district is segregated already. It's okey dokey for most of our high schools to be majority black, but it's not okay to have two zoned schools (Hillsboro & Hillwood) to be majority white. And each of these schools would still have in excess of 30%+ black students still attending each school. What exactly is the problem with that?
Posted 07/07/2008 at 06:24:16 PMI guess if you want to derail a plan that resulted from a broad spectrum of Nashville serving on a committee, involved lots of community input, and generally has support from most of the city, and you haven't been able to do so by arguing on the merits, you can try a last minute hail mary of calling the board and the mayor racist and invoking the questionable word of Nashville's least popular superintendent in history. This is unbelievable. I don't trust a word Garcia says.
Posted 07/07/2008 at 07:13:13 PMIt would also help if Woods would check the actual plan before reporting that black students from North Nashville would no longer be bussed to Hillsboro. Under the plan, the percentage of black students at Hillsboro would actually increase. The students no longer bussed to Hillsboro are from the more upscale areas of downtown and Germantown, which will now be zoned for Pearl-Cohn. These mostly white neighborhoods tried lobbying against the plan. If the plan and the task force were out to resegregate schools, they would have bowed to this pressue and not zoned these more affluent kids to Pearl Cohn.
Posted 07/07/2008 at 08:15:13 PMLet me be clear - I think concern over resegregation is important, and I think the task force has tried to address and respond to those concerns. I don't in any way want to see segregated schools. I personally don't think this plan results in segregated schools. Mostly, it blows my mind to see Pedro Garcia and his self-serving ego inserted into any discussions about the future of Nashville schools.
Posted 07/07/2008 at 08:28:30 PMWhy not figure out how to find an innovative way to give families all over Metro Nashville appealing choices within the option of public schools? And let them participate in the decision? No one shows up to "participate" at the rezoning hearings because it doesn't matter if they do.
What other large group of people do we tell where they have to go to get a multi-year service? Prisons/justice system/entitlements?
We're smarter than this and we have Peabody College and other great educational institutions here who can work with citizens to think outside the old box. Zoning is the old box. We know from history, academic magnets, that people will venture out from their comfort zone, ie neighborhood, if what they want is offered.
Somebody has to set the pace. Let's do it.
Posted 07/07/2008 at 08:31:23 PMHis hair looks good though in that picture!
Posted 07/07/2008 at 10:07:18 PMMaybe we should focus on desegregating neighborhoods so that neighborhood schools will be naturally desegregated rather than wasting alot of time and money busing.
Posted 07/22/2008 at 12:13:28 PMWould that be solved by a better educated public who could have higher incomes and therefore more flexibility in their living choices? It is a circular dilemma. Or, no single parenting allowed because that reduces discretionary income also.
Posted 07/22/2008 at 01:33:22 PM