Notes

Part one of the series, “Failure Factories,” by the Tampa Bay Times, brings up an issue with five Pinellas County schools. The schools, which were once average-performing schools, are today ranked as the worst schools in Florida. In 1964, ten years after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation, a black parent confronted the school district and asked to have his son placed in an all-white school. When the district refused, the parent sued in federal court. In the year 1971, school board voted to desegregate countywide and adopted rules that barred any school from being more than 30 percent black. These efforts helped to improve grades for black students, but parents started to complain about the inconvenience and high cost of busing their kids to far away schools. These complaints led to the re-segregation of schools, and inevitably, a huge list of other consequences.
As described in greater detail in parts two and three, when the children were transferred back into their neighborhood schools, the schools returned to a state of segregation mirroring the layout of the already segregated neighborhoods. Following the change, people stated to see a ripple-effect, beginning when many of the top teachers resigned from those schools. It wasn’t long until these schools were short-staffed and hiring almost anyone who applied. As to be expected, students’ test scores plummeted and they began to break the rules, bully one another, and engage in violence. Keeping these things in mind, it was all too common for the Pinellas County students to go through numerous different teachers in the same year.