There’s a lot not to like at what has been going on at St. Petersburg’s embattled John Hopkins Middle School. By all accounts, it’s a mess borne of chronically disruptive students, also known as “hoodlums” to the euphemism challenged. A weak administration and irresponsible parents are enabling, powder-keg factors.
But here’s something to ponder while waiting for Joe “Lean On Me” Clark to come out of retirement to kick butt, put parents on notice and tell Uhurus to help out or hit the road. The Hopkins’ disgrace is cause for as much sadness and reflection as anger and alarm.
That’s because Hopkins, which is in a predominantly black neighborhood, is only three years removed from being a model school for voluntary integration. Well-regarded magnet programs were its hallmark. There was even an award-winning school newspaper and a touted orchestra. All of that is now seriously at risk at a school widely perceived as out of control. Magnet applications are half of what they used to be.
The usual societal factors and insufficient resources are referenced. But nothing resonates like Pinellas County’s reversion to neighborhood schools, a concept that almost everyone agrees with – in the abstract. But in concrete reality, it means some schools will be skewed by low incomes and academic underachievement. Which is code for black neighborhoods. Hopkins now “leads” all middle schools in the number of over-age and learning-disabled students.
But this is not the era of Jim Crow segregation and degradation, where black neighborhoods circled the wagons and took care of their own – a nurturing network of nuclear families, neighbors, shop owners and preachers. Life was legally unfair, but it wasn’t dysfunctional. Discipline was ingrained and reinforced. There were no Hip-Hopkins Middle Schools.
Now it seems the largely discredited and uniformly disliked social experiment of massive busing has been turned on its head. Hopkins even feeds the insulting stereotype that a majority-black school and educational excellence are somehow incompatible, if not oxymoronic.
Joe Clark, please call the Pinellas School Board.