Buffalo parents asked to join civil rights lawsuit

BY CAROLETTE MEADOWS

As a parent of a Buffalo Public School student, I have filed a breech of contract law suit on behalf of my child in U.S. District Court regarding the Board of Education’s failure to comply with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) agreement. The OCR agreement was conceded to by the BPS after complaints were filed alleging discrimination against children of color in accessing the criteria based schools. The district admitted that preferential treatment was given to white students and minority students were tracked in the district’s worst schools.

I want parents to understand that every single minority child enrolled in a non-criteria school is covered by the OCR agreement. As such all parents, not only can file suit but should file suit. Filing a suit costs you nothing if you go to the federal court, file “pro se,” get assistance from the free pro se legal help desk in filing out your paperwork, and file papers for assigned counsel. This is the process I utilized to move my case forward on my own. If you are interested in filing suit, you can use this process or you can contact me about forming a class-action suit.

This district has admitted to discriminating against our kids, agreed to reforms, and has spent nearly two years playing cat and mouse with OCR in order to avoid the changes while simultaneously treating our children like nothing more than chattel.

These games must stop!

Your children are not livestock and should not be maintained on the Buffalo Public School’s substandard farmland. Their brains should not be malnourished nor their psyche scarred from the abuse of low expectations which helps steer them to the streets before they board the modern day middle passage vessel known as jail where they will provide slave labor for venture capitalists to get rich while the inmate’s family continues to live in poverty on the outside.

One way for us to help our children gain educational equity and hopefully guide them away from the concrete slaveship is to form a class-action lawsuit. By myself, my lawsuit helps my child but does virtually nothing to help yours.  Numerous parents filing suits helps to build strength that works to benefit future generations by making it economically burdensome to maintain the chains of oppression.

Remember, this is not the first time this district has needed federal oversight. When this happened in the 70’s, Buffalo ended up building a magnet system that was so successful, it became a national model. But, the minute the feds entrusted this district to be self-regulating, the status quo went back to business as usual and destroyed this district in favor of treating it like a jobs program for everyone’s friends and family.

So while your child went without books, BPS employee families got to live in the suburbs with quality schools or they lived in the city with the benefit of having their kids in the criteria or private schools.

Let the racist whites and elitist blacks of this district know, “If you don’t feed my child’s mind, I’ll try keep you from feeding your child’s belly!”

If we make it difficult for this district to make payroll by making it bleed cash via law suits, then they will “turn from their wicked ways” and we can “heal the land.”

You can read the lawsuit at this link: Meadows vs. Board of Education.

Carolette Meadows can be reached at carolettedm@yahoo.com