Using Coronavirus Relief Fund to Prevent Evictions
Note to Members of the Housing Task Force from Mike O’Sullivan
During the 5/11 City Council meeting, Mr. Jones indicated that $20MM of the $154.5MM Coronavirus Relief Fund would be entrusted to the Housing Task Force. On behalf of OneMECK, I am writing to suggest that a significant portion of that money be allocated to eviction prevention.
The Chief Justice’s moratorium on eviction trials will expire on May 31. There are already 1800+ eviction complaints pending for trial, and the small courtrooms cannot safely accommodate all of the potential litigants. While many tenants remain unemployed and unable to pay rent and other necessities, landlords are feeling their own economic pressures to collect rent or evict their residents. The best relief for this crisis is to assist the needy tenants immediately with rent and avoid attorney fees and court costs. There is no more urgent need in our community. Our homeless shelters are already overflowing.
City Council and the philanthropic community have already begun working on this problem, with the City allocating CDBG/ESG funding and United Way/Foundation for the Carolinas awarding grants from the COVID-19 Response Fund.
However, given the extent of this problem, the currently available funding will fall far short of the need. That is why it is critical that the Housing Task Force immediately allocates a portion of the $20MM from the Coronavirus Relief Fund to fill this gap. This stop-gap funding would be critical lifeline to those families experiencing temporary unemployment and can’t pay rent. It will prevent a surge in evictions and homelessness. For owners, it could save court costs for evictions of $126 and litigation charges of $350 + per case—many thousands of dollars. And, through Crisis Assistance Ministry, there is already a “tried and true” mechanism for ensuring these funds get immediately to those who need them.
Barry Sherman’s statement to BOE, April 12, 2016
Educational researchers across this country stand in broad agreement about what currently constitutes best practice regarding pupil assignment and socioeconomically diverse schools. Here are 4 widely accepted points of understanding:
1) Low-income children have the best chance for success in school and life when educated alongside middle-class and wealthy peers. It’s about access and opportunity beyond the neighborhood.
2) Who a child goes to school with matters profoundly. Critical thinking, aspirations, and stereotypical beliefs are greatly influenced by the peer group norm that shapes the school’s academic and social culture.
3) High-poverty schools cannot be “fixed” while keeping low-income children separate and isolated. Staff in these schools are overwhelmed by the grossly disproportionate level of needs. The sad fact is no matter the enticements or incentives, the very best teachers – largely due to the stress – don’t stay in high-poverty schools. High-poverty schools are forced to operate like reactive emergency rooms rather than proactive wellness clinics. 4) Nationally and within Charlotte-Mecklenburg – with few unique exceptions – high-poverty schools – despite huge and multi-leveled interventions – have been (and remain) tragically unsuccessful in terms of getting kids to grade-level proficiency and ensuring all high school diplomas hold equal value.
Research and data might convince the mind, but often does little to sway the heart. The heartfelt concerns and feelings expressed by many parents in our community are just as real as our country’s most widely embraced research. So, how best to find common ground that respects both heart and mind?
1) Let’s stand united in the deep knowing that high-poverty schools cripple kids & our community.
2) Let’s stand united in the deep knowing that our community has no appetite for forced busing.
3) In our imperfect efforts to do what’s best for all CMS students, while saying “no” to high-poverty schools and “no” to forced busing, let’s passionately say YES to creative and long-term policies and other solutions that place the onus of responsibility and accountability on our entire community.
Our Community, Our Schools
By James E. Ford
Presentation to CMS Board on April 12, 2016
I’ve written and spoken pretty extensively on issue of student assignment from the student and teacher perspective. But today I speak as a CMS parent and concerned Charlottean.
There once was a time when we could say that we didn’t know. We didn’t know that CMS had so many schools with concentrated poverty. That many of our schools had become so racially isolated. We didn’t know that fixating so many of these students in the same schools was so harmful and injurious to them. That our poorest most vulnerable residents were least likely to mobilize upward in comparison to our major municipal counterparts. Perhaps we could say that we didn’t know that schools and housing patterns were so delicately intertwined together. Or that our district had effectively resegregated along race and class lines in a way that has a deleterious effect on the life chances of our youth. There may have been a space in time when we could claim ignorance or naivety. But that day is over and that time has since expired.
We are now faced with putting to test the theory embodied in the saying, “if people knew better, they’d do better”. We are now in the know. What we know is there’s a half century of scholarly peer reviewed research supporting integrated schools as a means of closing achievement gaps and ensuring equity. We know that alleged “neighborhood schools” are not the byproduct of some sort of natural selection, but the result of careful crafted boundaries driven by politics and economics. That talk of “forced bussing”, even in it’s absence from conversations about student assignment, is an Atwaterian proxy for something else. That inclusive schools yield academic benefits for low income students, while allowing affluent students continue to thrive. That as emotionally attached as we may be to the concept of neighborhood schools, there’s virtually no academic literature showing it positively impacts student outcomes for all children. That separate, is STILL inherently unequal..
So now here we are, compelled to move from words and thoughts, to action. The state
constitution guarantees that students have the right to a sound basic education and “equal opportunities shall be provided for ALL students”. Schools are a common good, belong to the people so in truth, they are all our schools. While the problem is complex and cannot be solved entirely by schools, the education sector does have a role to play.
“Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”
Kayla Romero’s presentation to CMS Board
Presented to the Board of Education February 9, 2016
Good evening, My name is Kayla Romero. I come to this podium wearing multiple hats…I was a former CMS teacher at Ranson IB Middle School, I’m a member of several community organizations, I’m a millennial who is currently debating if Charlotte will remain home and where I start a family, and I work for an organization called Students for Education Reform, which supports and trains local high school and college students as community organizers for education justice. The common thread between all of these is my deep investment in our community and education system.
The testimony I share tonight has been shaped by my student’s voices, lived experiences, and suppressed desires.
First, I want to ask the School Board to be courageous in undertaking a new student assignment plan. Take this opportunity to bring greater equity and justice across Charlotte by reducing the concentration of high poverty schools. I not only want to challenge you as a board to do this, but your constituents because I realize you are elected by our community. I want this community to consider that it takes privilege and advantage to choose the neighborhood you live in and that privilege has been denied to our communities of color in Charlotte and beyond. I don’t think a new student assignment plan will single handily solve all of our problems (teacher turnover, low performance, the opportunity gap), but I think it is one of the strategies we must employ to make progress. The drafted goals are solid first steps.
In order to do this, I believe it is important to reach a conclusion about the Superintendent Search that does not further alienate any of our communities and divide us. Often, we immediately take an either/or approach, but I believe there are other alternatives, such as keeping Superintendent Ann Clark while starting the search process.
With this time I also want to address the need to support our undocumented students and families in CMS. With recent ICE raids and deportation proceedings we have to take a stand and be informed on what we CAN DO. I hope school leaders including those of you serving on the Board will make public commitments to helping these students and ensuring that our schools, including bus stops are safe. None of our kids deserve to live in fear.
Last, but not least I want to echo what some students have said this evening. Our students (of all ages, race, religion, and zipcode) have rich perspective and valuable opinions. It is my hope that as a community and education system we figure out how to support them as thought partners and leaders in improving CMS.
3 steps CMS should take with a student assignment plan
Published in the Charlotte Observer October 31, 2015
From Barry Sherman and Justin Perry, co-chairs of OneMECK.org:
As the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board undertakes the formidable task of pupil reassignment, OneMECK urges the board to proceed quickly with three key steps: define simple, straightforward guiding principles; hire an experienced professional team to prepare plan options; and then engage the community in plan selection and adoption.
Over the course of many meetings, the CMS Policy Committee has attempted without success to arrive at consensus about guiding principles for pupil assignment. Inevitably, the discussions have migrated from identifying guiding principles to possible pupil assignment solutions (magnets, choice zones, etc.).
We urge the committee to adopt simple, general, guiding principles. We recommend (in no order of priority): maximization of student achievement, diversity of the student body (broadly defined), and students’ proximity to the school.
With those three guiding principles, the board can enlist the expertise of an experienced professional team to perform a comprehensive review of pupil assignment and craft plan options that seek to balance the three guiding principles. Creating a new pupil assignment plan balancing student achievement, diversity and proximity in order to make our schools stronger is a monumental task.
CMS staff need outside support from an experienced team. The consultant team can gather and analyze data, then present plans that include different strategies to satisfy the directive of the guiding principles. The range of options that satisfy the guiding principles can then be presented to the public for discussion.
The board has discussed preceding the reassignment process with a communitywide survey to gauge the preferences of CMS families. We believe that such public input will be more valuable later in the process, when concrete options are available for review.
As with so much education policy, the devil will be in the details, and community members need to see those details in order to have the most productive discussions.
Our greatest hope is that in the new pupil assignment planning process, our community will find the will to embrace the needs of all our children. And that in embracing a new pupil assignment plan, we will move toward student and school community integration.