Role of Community Influencers & Using Fiscal Solvency cont…
This is the latest example of mismanagement and lack of communication between government
entities under the State to unfairly shut off families, so that homes go without water for months
when they cannot afford the rate hikes, while they are allowing water to flow uninterrupted in
the basements of abandoned schools.
This is a community under State control where children arrive at school too late for school breakfast because of a broken
school bus, or city bus behind schedule to locked doors, so they miss breakfast at the Governor’s EAA schools. Complainants
speak about traffic chaos outside of EAA elementary schools where children run between buses and cars. Complainants speak
about the Governor fertilizing gang growth by forcing students out into unknown neighborhoods alone.
This is a community where schools go without soap and sometimes without heat, where audits show anomalies that have never
been corrected by the State’s agents for years.
Fiscal solvency?
This is a community where the State approved $424 million in tax dollars intended for schools go to build a stadium for a
billionaire. Says School Board President Herman Davis:
The photos of abandoned buildings and stories of crime in Detroit, “the murder
city” are in all of our memory banks. So, when the victims are poor and black, the
excuse that this was done for fiscal solvency almost sounds plausible. Yet, if white
students were attending a school without heat or toilet tissue, no one would give the
Superintendent a $50,000 bonus.
White families would not be told to use the local river as a drinking fountain and toilet without a care.
It is only because we are black and many of are poor that those who are advantaged look the other way.
There has been no compassion for the safety of people, even in the schools where in the pitch black confusion of a school
emergency, parents have been challenged to find their disabled children waiting for help in the darkness.
In light of what has been actually experienced by many residents, children, and us, then, it’s an insult to call the goal of the
Governor’s actions, ‘fiscal solvency’. A better word to describe the actions to profit from cruelty is the word ‘inhumane’.
Therefore, based upon emails we have read prior to the Governor taking office, his ideology with other public services, and
the willingness to allow human beings to suffer from lack of basics like fire trucks, traffic lights, water, we conclude:
1) that fiscal insolvency in the district was helped along by prior state actions
2) parties worked to create and exploit the conditions to result in privatization of some public sector services,
3) this process has been has been burdensome on black, Latino and disabled students and
4) some actions have been unethical, unsafe, and inhumane and would not be tolerated in a majority white district.
Because of the great power of the Governor, and his appointees to retaliate against any participants in the filing of this
complaint, we beg of you to handle our Title 6 case by individuals in offices outside of the boundaries of the Great Lakes
region.
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