NAACP, others step up opposition to rezoning plan

Metro Council member's church to host organizing meeting tomorrow

Email | Print By Amy Griffith

Efforts opposing a Metro schools rezoning plan are expected to grow these week, even though the Board of Education last week approved the plan in a five-to-four vote.

The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will learn this week if the group wants to file a rezoning-related lawsuit against Metro Nashville Public Schools. School board member Ed Kindall this morning addressed a letter to the Metro Council, raising several questions about financial aspects of the approved plan.

And tomorrow, an organizing meeting will be held in an effort to “overturn” the school board’s decision. The meeting will be hosted by the local NAACP chapter, and was promoted over the weekend in an e-mail from Metro Council member Jerry Maynard.

“The School Board was defiant and determined to take African-American kids out of the Hillwood Cluster and put them in segregated (“neighborhood”) schools,” Maynard wrote. “We know what happens when public schools are all Black and all Poor. These schools get left behind, under-served and receive inequitable resources. [sic]”

The meeting will take place at Southside Community Church, where Maynard is pastor.

The e-mail cites the rezoning plan’s projected impact on Pearl-Cohn High School, where the percentage of black students will increase from 88 to 91 percent, and notes the objections to the plan expressed by the Metro Council Black Caucus, the NAACP and the Interdenominational Ministers Fellowship.

Supporters of the rezoning plan associate it with a return to neighborhood schools. Opponents call it resegregation. The plan was developed by a school board-appointed task force of community members and has worked on its proposals since January in regular public meetings. The task force proposed its plan to the board in May.