Each summer my brother and I would go to our aunt and uncle's dairy farm. We so loved it there that when it came time for school to begin we didn't want to leave. The hard work on the farm was welcomed because at the end of every day my aunt, on her wood stove, would cook us all up a meal fit for kings.
My uncle drove a truck in town for a local company. The farm consisted of pigs, chickens, a couple of beagles, a collie named Lassie, a varied number of barn cats, a few ducks and 16 Holstein cows.
Uncle Joe would get home about 5 p.m. Lassie and he would go to the barn. Lassie would be told to go get the cows and she would head off down the pasture lane where the cows had been grazing all day. Milking was done by hand and the barn cats would line up against the wall waiting for that squirt of warm milk. Uncle Joe had a three-legged stool that he would, with milk pail, move from one cow to the next. One time a cow kicked one the legs. The stool had two legs. Didn't seem to matter to the milking. He would turn his hat around and just lean on the cow's stomach and milk till she was dry. Why the story?
The plight of the black male is analogous to the three-legged stool. The black child grows up in poverty. That is one leg of the stool. He lives in distressed and sometimes dangerous neighborhoods, another leg, and then he is confronted with a school system that fails him. All three legs of support for that child are gone. Where does the finger of blame actually need to be pointed?
Chattanooga and the county have two distinctly different and quite separate school systems. It has always been that way. We knew at the time of the merger that unless leadership saw the plight of the inner city poor nothing will change and nothing has. If the 60 percent of reading failure rate is not a call for something different, what will?
More crime, more squabbles with leadership at the city level and the solution is quite simple and straight forward. Improve the school system by adoption of learner needs not group needs. That five-year-old learner that comes ill-equipped for school is the responsibility of the school system to educate, not fail to educate. Does the community want to rid itself of gangs? Try educating, really educating and watch what happens.
Robert Brooks