President Obama’s Justice Department is forcing one of Louisiana’s top elementary schools to weaken its tuition and merit-based admission requirements in favor of skin color, using the strong arm of the court to allegedly “desegregate” the school by carving out a more lenient admitting system for black students.
The DOJ announced Wednesday it had reached a settlement agreement with A.E. Phillips Laboratory School, a K-8 institution owned by Louisiana Tech University and based in Ruston, the seat of Lincoln Parish. An academics-focused program with an "emphasis on the arts," the school was ranked this past year as the top elementary school in Louisiana, as well as one of the top 25 elementary schools in the entire country. Its accolades include high academic performance, a great student/teacher ratio, high teacher morale and a low absence rate, and constructive disciplinary practices.
Getting into the prestigious institution isn’t cheap. According to the school’s website, a single year’s tuition will set a family back $2,200 per kid. Considering the average family income in Lincoln Parish (which is 55 percent white) is only about $34,000, that’s a pretty hefty price tag for a year’s worth of schooling.
Unable to let a success story go unpunished, the DOJ accused A.E. Phillips of discriminating against local black kids by not recruiting enough of them, and by not having a special system in place that makes it easier for students of color to attend. On top of that, the department also alleged the school isn’t doing enough to recruit black staff members.
To correct this imbalance, the DOJ is now forcing the school to admit black students based not on their academic performance or their family’s ability to pay the tuition, but solely because of their skin color. They're also requiring that the school deliberately expand its classrooms to make room for more black kids, provide free meals for students of color who qualify and alter their demographics to reflect the community's racial makeup (which is about 40 percent black).
Special advantages that will be given to black students over students of other ethnicities will now include, according to the DOJ:
- increase the percentage of black student enrollment so that the percentage of black students enrolled at A.E. Phillips reflects the percentage of black students in grades K-8 enrolled in Lincoln Parish School Board’s schools by the 2020 through 2021 school year;
- take steps to expand A.E. Phillips’ existing facilities to two classrooms per grade level to accommodate additional black student enrollment;
- develop a comprehensive plan to recruit black students for incoming kindergarten classes and for available vacancies in other grade levels;
- offer full and partial tuition scholarships to admitted black students who are eligible for free and reduced price student meals under the federal guidelines;
- offer free and reduced price meals to admitted black students who meet the federal requirements for assistance; and
- take affirmative measures to recruit black candidates for administrator, teacher, certified staff and other staff vacancies at the school.
Every single black person in Lincoln Parish should be insulted by the insinuation that black students can’t get into a high-performing academic institution without special government assistance – and that apparently, black kids are assumed to need free lunches.
Every single white person should be insulted that their child will be held to the school’s high tuition and performance requirements while students of color are exempted from those standards based on their levels of melanin.
And every single American should be insulted that the federal government is so intertwined in our educational system that they can bully a high-performing school into such adopting cost-prohibitive, performance-threatening policies.