Week 5!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/education/detroit-public-schools-education.html

Yesterday I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a headline that said “Detroit Students Do Not Have a Constitutional Right to Literacy.” I was appalled by this headline and had to check it out myself to see what all of this was about. It said, “in his decision on Friday dismissing the suit, Judge Stephen J. Murphy III said that “access to literacy” — which he also referred to as a “minimally adequate education” — was not a fundamental right. And he said the lawsuit had failed to show that the state had practiced overt racial discrimination.” I’m honestly just baffled about what the local and state government is doing to help the community, if they can’t even provide DETROIT students with an adequate education. As a former student of five different Detroit Public schools, I have attended schools that were in really poor conditions. In most, if not all, of the schools I attended, we had to work with old, torn up books. Sometimes we didn’t have enough books so we’d have to take pictures of the pages on our phones or share books with one another. We did not have toilet paper, paper towel, or soap in the bathrooms so the students would have to buy their own and share with their peers. We had pest problems, falling ceilings, several substitute teachers because the school could not find certified teachers who wanted to work for DPS, and small overcrowded classrooms with no heat/ac holding 50 students and a teacher. Schools like this are already absolutely hard to concentrate in and after reading this article, it feels like a slap in the face from the government. If you look at other districts like Royal Oak, Troy, Birmingham, etc these problems don’t exist. It’s hard to believe that this is not a racial issue when Detroit is 82% African American. Detroit already gets a bad rep and if we cant even receive a proper education because the government believes that we should feel lucky to even have something, then what the f*** does the future look like for the next generation of kids. Transitioning from a DPS school to the University of Michigan is probably one of the hardest things I’ve done in life and I have to work twice as hard as everyone else. What is crazy is that I came from the “best” high school in Detroit, but our conditions were equal to the worst high school in a suburban neighborhood. I feel bad for students in Detroit public schools because so many of them are so intelligent, they just don’t have the same opportunities as everyone else.