By Josh Resnek
Recent public meetings with many of our public officials, among them some who are hopelessly misguided, have centered on the overcrowding difficulties now facing the public schools.
A number of high ranking public officials have repeated a chorus of sound good, feel good Trump type solutions, which includes removing from the EPS those students who do not live here and exporting them.
Removing students who do not live here, that is, taking out of the public schools Blacks, Browns and Hispanics who are here because of home life difficulties, but who do not have an official residency, is touted as a space saving solution by the administration and the administration’s sycophants and followers on the School Committee.
Who would remove the students from class? Everett police?
Would they be handcuffed?
Would the administration tout how Everett is cleaning up its public schools and reducing overcrowding by removing those whose lives are in tatters to begin with?
Think of what a sickening television news report that would make!
There have been suggestions of hiring as many as a dozen truant officers to start the process of removal, which would be akin to ex- porting from the city the helpless.
This type of posturing is racist at its base, and unworkable as a policy intended to impact meaningfully on the overcrowding issue.
As School Department leadership has pointed out – there aren’t enough illegal students to justify a dozen truant officers, let alone to justify the truant officers now working.
There is the need for classroom space for about 1,500 students.
Whether they belong here or not, they are here and it is up to the community to be a bit bigger than itself and to do the right thing.
What is that?
Show a bit of class. Drop the racist propaganda about the cause of overcrowding.
Everett doesn’t need to build a wall.
Everett needs to have another school.
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Josh Resnek is the publisher and editor of the Leader Herald.