From our friends at the Michigan Network for Equity in Education.
Please use this brand new 9-minute documentary by Kate Levy as an organizing tool against the threatened school closures by the State Reform Office. Please show it to your community groups and post it to your Facebook page as well as the Facebook pages to which you belong. Show it in your classrooms.
This film helps expose the State’s cynical and racist agenda in Detroit and beyond. In all, 38 schools are targeted across the state for closure this year alone, in Saginaw, Pontiac, Benton Harbor, Kalamazoo, River Rouge, East Detroit, Muskegon Heights, and Detroit. All 38 schools are predominately African American schools.
In Detroit, the State drove public schools into the ground through two decades of state mismanagement that devastated the District both academically and financially. Now it is using the results of that mismanagement to justify closing dozens of schools at the very moment that the District has finally obtained a degree of autonomy from the State and some relief from State-created crushing debt.
What happens next matters, and you can be a part of the effort to derail this next step in the decades-long war on black children, families, and communities in our state. If we’ve learned anything in the past month, it’s that our vigilance is both required and effective in stopping the precipitous slide away from democracy and toward a nightmare society of exclusion and abuse.
The Last Cut? We the People of Detroit Documentary on School Closings from Kate Levy on Vimeo.
