Role of Community Influencers & Using Fiscal Solvency cont…
We can only accept at face value that the effort was to help make Charters in Michigan more profitable with an influx of more
students and capital by experimenting on their incubation in a minority community. Some of the foundations involved in this
plan may have had the best interest of children in mind. However, we can only conclude that in a community where
everybody wants to be somebody, there have been some big vultures circling hoping to push the culture and voice of the people
off the top of the hill and have themselves appointed by whomever has control.
All the hard work of Martin Luther King and so many others to see African Americans in positions of local leadership be
damned. If they could get themselves appointed, that is all the democracy the black community needed.
There is not sufficient space to go over the merits of the case against EFM, Robert Bobb, a member of the Coalition, who had
been appointed by the outgoing Governor Granholm. We hope it suffices to simply summarize that the court ruled that
Robert Bobb, a member of this group of influencers, did not act in the best interest of DPS. Judge Wendy Baxter stated he
caused irreparable harm to the students of the Detroit Public Schools. He left the district in the biggest deficit it has ever seen,
until now. So who was he acting in the best interest of?
Not us.
Governor Snyder is not beholden to this group of co-conspirators for all of his ideas. The Governor, his donors, and
consultants clearly and independently believe in privatization themselves. In fact, members of the Governor’s team which
wrote the book on Charters. Richard McClellan, the Minority Czar, is an expert on Charters. He wrote the laws for Governor
Engler which put Charters in Detroit in the first place. What he has in the Coalition is a skeleton of suburban African
American entrepreneurs, aspiring power brokers, Charter operators and foundations which will help achieve his goal and a
few honest people.
If the people of Detroit had not already spent enough on construction, Robert Bobb and Sharlonda Buckman convinced
voters to agree to Proposal S which put millions more tax payer dollars into renovating public school buildings.
Hundreds of millions in construction dollars later, the next appointed Emergency Manager of DPS, (appointed by Governor
Snyder), Roy Roberts closed schools (even newly remodeled ones) for low enrollment and other reasons and also transferred
newly constructed and transferred other newly remodeled and constructed school buildings to a DPS competitor, the charters
and to the EAA, founded by the Governor. Thus, where we once had student achievers and football games, we now have
meeting places for gang bangers.
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