"This American Life"

Reflection

"This American Life"

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-one

This was an interesting podcast explaining the integration process and trials of the Normandy school district. The podcast mainly followed the story of Nedra Martin and her daughter Mah'Ria Pruitt-Martin's story and how they experienced the trials and errors of the integration process in the Normandy district and surrounding districts. The school Mah'Ria was in was in bad condition. The school was on probation. The school was not just on a week long probation. Not a month long probation. The school was on a 15 year long probation. It was not counted as a qualified school for 15 years. After these long 15 years, the district then lost its accreditation from the state entirely. The district let the students transfer to whatever neighboring school they wanted and over 1000 students took this offer. Many of these transfer students excelled in their schools and held honor positions. However, before the students could even enter these schools, they were met with great trials from the parents of the current students at the school. Many parents thought that the new students would drop the rating of the school. They also thought that they would make the school a much more dangerous place. They felt that in order to have these new students, they would need to install metal detectors or hire drug sniffing dogs or other things that would prevent students from bringing bad things into the schools. They said that this was the only way they would let their children continue attending the school. Let me tell you, as a students from a mainly white school district that had a pretty good ranking, there were still a great amount of drugs and dangerous items that entered the school, even without students from lower level schools entering into my district. Honestly, I don't think that any extra students would have made the district any worse than it already was. In the podcast they mentioned that the government then took over and changed the Normandy district all together and made it into an non-accredited district so that they could get away with keeping children in this awful district. Those that stayed in this district did not get the chance they deserved and fell behind, all because the government didn't want to spend a little bit more money on the education budget.