Homeless children denied access to education
1992 1992-09Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 5 →
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SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1992 5 to of as The McKinney Act of 1990 was recently used as a lever by the Texas Legal Aid Society to force the Texas legislature to rescind laws that placed obstacles in the way of enrolling homeless children in public schools.
If PSP obtains an injunction against the Minneapolis public schools for noncompliance with the McKinney Act, the school district could lose its federal funding. kol Kooster Considerable resistance has been mounted to the idea of mainstreaming homeless children by the Learning Center.
The Learning Center is a subsidiary of the Minneapolis Community Action Agency (MCAA), an antipoverty body with solid connections to the local Democratic Party-dominated political establishment. MCAA has received funding at all levels of government. Its executive director, William Davis, is a prominent figure in the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP.
The Learning Center is hot-wired to the Minneapolis School Board, which has a couple of members on the Learning Center's board of directors. One of them is Len Biernet. His wife is executive director of the Learning Center. Another is Larry Harris, a former PR man for the Minneapolis public schools, who came out of retirement to work as a consultant for the Minneapolis school system.
It will be interesting to see how Democratic Party politicians, who run the city administration, the city council, and the school board, will handle this situation.
The Learning Center and the Minneapolis School Board appear to believe that they are in a position to negotiate with the PSP.
The Minneapolis School Board apparently is coming up with offers to settle this dispute with the PSP short of the full compliance with the McKinney Act that the organization for the homeless demands. But the PSP has gone too far in demanding equal access to education for children in its shelter-and has brought too much attention to this issue—to be in a position to cut a deal with the school board.
The demand to open up school enrollments for homeless children is not only in the immediate interests of homeless families. It is also in the interests of working people who are a check or two away from the streets. It is a demand that should be taken up by the leadership of the Black community and the labor movement in Minneapolis and elsewhere.