By JOSH RESNEK
The School Committee voted unanimously last week not to allow outsiders, those residing outside of Everett, to gain an edge and a better education for their children by signing them up here to go to one of the city’s public schools.
School Choice will not be exercised here.
If you’re from out of the city, stay out of the city.
The city does not want your kids in our public schools.
This may come as a shock to many in the city but there is a great number of parents out there living in places like Chelsea, Revere, and Malden who believe attending school in Everett as an advantage over doing so in those other places nearby.
Obviously, refusing to allow kids from outside the city to matriculate in the Everett public schools is not a racial thing.
Such a thought is laughable given the exotic racial mix in the EPS.
On second look, however, the measure not allowing others to go to school here who come from working class backgrounds or working poor or welfare poor backgrounds is about as exclusionary as it gets.
In much wealthier towns with much higher family median incomes, School Choice is used to exclude people of race and color from entering those towns perfect social circles of nearly all-white populations.
If you live in Lynn, for instance, the nearby towns of Swampscott and Marblehead have never allowed Lynn students into their school systems for fear of reading scores.
School Choice is used to exclude students of color and ethnicity in places like those.
In Everett, the excuse for not allowing others who want to be students here be- cause better athletics and after school programming and elite classes like those in robotics they want to be a part of is not about racial and economic profiling – but it really is.
The reason for no School Choice is simple.
“We’re just too crowded here to allow others into the school system from outside the city,” School Commit- teeman Frank Parker told his colleagues.
The irony is not lost on Everett public school observers that Everett is sought after by parents wanting to give their children a better choice than they have in their hometown school systems but can’t do it because they are excluded from the city.
Not one school committee person spoke up in favor of School Choice.
Although the vote fit the pro forma – that Everett is too crowded – it was a vote about exclusion.
But then, maybe there is some satisfaction knowing that students from Marblehead or Swampscott wanting to matriculate in the Everett public schools would not be allowed.
How’s that for irony!