Why Is This Man Smiling?

Picture from the Commercial Appeal


The new school board district boundaries came out recently and I only a got to take a look at them a few days ago. When I did, I noticed something interesting. Take a look at the map below. Do you see it?



Notice district 1. It lies on the poplar corridor. Now look at districts 2, 5, and 6. Notice anything about them in relation to 3, 4, and 7. Seems like all the black voters are packed into 2, 5, and 6, and all the white voters into 3,4, and 7. That means district 1 is the battle ground, but is it really?

I looked at all the voters that took part in the August 2010 primary. Just shy of 24,000 people voted who live in the new district 1. Over 17,000 were democrats and over 6,500 were republicans. That is to be expected, but when you look at the racial breakdown, it turns out to be around 10,000 black voters and almost 14,000 white voters. So the new school board will be majority white and it will remain like that for the next 20 years.

If you combine the city and county school systems' populations, you will have 153,000 students that are nearly 65% black. If those towns in the county break off into separate schools districts it jumps up to around 80%. The question then arises, if those separate schools systems form, do those voters still take part in school board elections and maintain a white majority school board of an overwhelmingly black population school system?

Back to the picture at the top, I can figure out why Pickler is smiling, but what is Jones excited about? You thought you would get funding and control. Yet the majority population of Shelby county will not have control of the system their kids attend and without control you aren't going to get that funding either.