Almost eleven and I’ve been busy getting ready to pass out more flyers. Hope my unruly hair doesn’t put people off. I have to trim it and my lawn which has grown equally unruly with all the rain. I just got a call from my friend Tim of “Driving while black” who features in my DWB posts. He offered to pass out literature with me for a couple hours today after I snuck in a couple of quick posts.
And on the theme of minority board members MPR had a revealing story today about how white Minnesota school boards are. I noted that myself in an August 8th post:
By the way, I took some of those cards to the MSBA conference thinking they could serve as my new “business card.” I ended up only passing out a few. A half dozen went to African American board members and administrators. Their numbers are soaring over their numbers twenty years ago when I went with Mary Cameron to similar conferences. I’d judge they constituted a magnificent .016% of yesterday’s attendees. That is a ten fold improvement over what was closer to a .0016% twenty years ago. As one black superintendent told me when I gave him my card “people of color” would need to count on people like me (colorless I guess) for support on the equity front because there just weren’t all that many of them in positions of power in good old Minnesota.
By the way, I’ve been heartened in some of my door-to\-door conversations with parents of eastern children who deplore the uneven spending that kids in the western schools are getting. Until we can think of a better solution some of them seem willing to endure a trim for the greater good.
