The residents of the Tucson Unified School District pay some of the highest property taxes in the State of Arizona. Over the years, those same residents have elected and re-elected governing board members who have consistently voted to raise their taxes to the upper limit allowed by Arizona law.
So it came as a surprise and sparked outrage when the District’s new Superintendent H. T. Sanchez made the obviously unsupported claim on an Arizona Education Association sponsored radio show that the people in Tucson, with disposable income, did not want to support the education of children or grandchildren that did not look like them.
“Again you know, I go back to it has to be the will of the citizens in this State who vote in people who value public education, and that’s something that I really call into question coming in as an outsider, is how much do we value education? You know, I do believe that the contemporary challenge we have in the Southwest particularly is how do you convince people who have the disposable income to educate children who don’t look like their children? And hmm. That’s especially true where we are, Arizona. The population that has the disposable wealth, those that have good jobs, good retirement and have good income it is, it’s asking them to educate kids who don’t look like their kids or don’t look like their grandkids.”
In that same interview, Sanchez called creationism “crazy.” According to an article in the Huffington Post, nearly 46 percent of Americans believe in creationism. However, only the same fraction believe that it, or any other religious dogma, should be taught in publicly funded schools.
Most, who heard the comments, were willing to give Sanchez the benefit of the doubt as to his view of Christian beliefs, but the controversy over his comments about the bigotry of Tucson residents is not going away.
Residents are asking how Sanchez arrived at his conclusion about them and their alleged unwillingness to support the education of their community’s children. However, experts in the area of equal access in education would say the answer is simple: prejudice. Prejudice, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “an unfair feeling of dislike for a person or group because of race, sex, religion, etc.: a feeling of like or dislike for someone or something especially when it is not reasonable or logical.”
Sanchez has fought hard to maintain racial imbalance in the district’s schools. He has rejected the court appointed Special Master’s recommendation that the district magnet schools are not only failing children, but they are failing the community by not delivering on the promise that they would draw children of different ethnicities from distant neighborhoods.
The Tucson Unified School District is a minority/majority district with a approximately 70 percent identified as Hispanic. The district receives approximately $1,000 more per pupil than other districts in the state due to a 30-year desegregation order that was to provide for racially balanced classes and equal access to educational excellence. According to one former teacher’s union member and education expert, TUSD receives nearly $2,000 more per student than the neighboring Sunnyside Unified School District which has a higher percentage of students living at or below the poverty level.
Of course, Sanchez’s commitment to keeping students in the less than successful schools is not shared by everyone on his staff. According to district insiders, at least one new administrator brought in from Texas by Sanchez, ordered that a child on a waiting list for a for a desirable back-to-basics be bumped off the list to accommodate his own child. The back-to-basics school model is highly sought by area parents who want a quality basic education for their children. However, due to the District’s continuing discrimination through low expectation, that model has not been introduced to many of the Distict’s underserved students.
Listen to the interview [ca_audio url_mp3=”http://arizonadailyindependentarchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Kids-dont-look-like-their-Grandkids.mp3″ url_ogg=”” skin=”regular” align=”none”]