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VOL. 15, NO.7

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Who will speak forBaltimores children?

On March 7, the Rev. Stephen Tillett of Mt. Zion UMC in Baltimore addressed a crowd of 500 members of BUILD Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development. Below are excerpts from his remarks.

The education of our children is our highest priority. We must declare to all who will hear, and especially those who refuse to hear, that we demand that the children be held harmless in the political tug of war over the control of the Baltimore City Public School System.

Our children are not expendable. They are not pawns in a political test of wills between the governor and mayor or anyone else. Our children are the hope and future of this great city and wed better start acting like it.

One of the main complaints about the current state of the city school system is that it is running at a deficit. How can people be surprised? Why are people just waking up to this fact?

Over the past decade and beyond, at least four commissions were established to determine what the problems were with the school system and how they might be fixed. The Rosenburg Commission, the Civiletti Commission, and other commissions and lawsuits filed against the school system and the state all reached the same conclusion: The Baltimore City School system is structurally underfunded.

The difficulties were experiencing today have been predicted for the past 10 to 15 years. But all of a sudden people are shocked and appalled that there is a budget deficit.

If the federal and state government continue to impose unfunded mandates upon the city school system, the system will be in deficit. That is what has happened. Governments cannot impose costly expectations on our system without providing adequate resources.

So how did the government respond? Did they provide funding? No. They took control, and therefore accountability, away from the citizens of Baltimore, the parents and guardians of the school children, and established a new appointed school board.

Does this sound familiar? In 1997, government leaders established a city-state partnership. Currently the governor and mayor jointly select city school board members from a pool of candidates reviewed by the state superintendent of schools.

Control of the school system, and accountability for its actions, needs to be returned to the citizens of the city of Baltimore to the parents and grandparents who have a vested interest in how this system performs. This should happen at the earliest possible date and not later than 2006.

Our resilient and gifted children have benefited from smaller class sizes, have increased their test scores and increased the graduation rate in spite of the storm thats been swirling around them. Imagine what they could do if their schools were adequately funded.

As the problems get fixed, we need to remember the children and hold them harmless.

They should not be penalized with larger class sizes or less instruction just because the system is running a structural deficit. There can be no more layoffs and no more cuts this academic year.

Furthermore, the $42 million given to the school system by the city should not be a loan. It should be a down payment on the money owed to the Baltimore City Public School System as a result of the structural under funding and the unfunded mandates being imposed upon us year after year.

There was a similar situation that occurred in Scripture. In Exodus, the Pharaoh of Egypt was angry that Moses and Aaron had the nerve to come to his palace and demand freedom for the children of Israel who where slaves in Egypt.

In response, the pharaoh decreed that the slaves were not longer to be given straw to make the bricks, but would be required to make the same number of bricks as before.

So now Baltimore City Schools are being asked to make bricks without straw, to run a school system without money, to have control of that underfunded system taken away from us.

We say give us control of our system, give us the money we need to run it and watch our children soar. The children of Baltimore can do just as well as any other children if they get the same support and resources.