California Fredmont Unified School District being sued for Racial discrimination
Walter Lee
Parents' lawsuit claims bias
* Group says boundary plan is unfair to high achieving
Asian American students
BY DANA HULL - San Jose Mercury News Staff Writer
San Jose Mercury News. Monday, March 6, 2000.
Summary:
----------
A group of Asian American parents known as Concerned Fremont
Parents has filed a racial discrimination suit against the Fremont
Unified School District in the U.S District Court in San Jose,
California. The Lawsuit charges that the Feb. 23 decision to alter
the system by which elementary and junior high schools feed into
high school was being redrawn so their children will boost test
scores at a lower performing campus uses race based classifications
inorder to enact the plan and violates the Constitution's 14th
Amendment. At the heart of the dispute is the reassignment of
students from Weibel Elementary School which has the largest
Chinese American population and is the highest ranked school in
the Fremont Unified district. Weibel Students will be moved
out of the Mission San Jose High School attendance area and move
to the Irvington High School. School officials have maintained
that the shifts are necessary to alleviate overcrowding in
the Mission San Jose schools. Erica Yew, an attorney with
the San Jose firm of McManis, Faulkner & Morgan, is representing
the parents. The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of
compensatory damages related to any loss in home property values.
Real estate in California has historically been tied to school
reputation, and homes in the Mission area are among the
more expensive in Fremont. The lawsuit claims that during
school board meetings, white attendees:
1) mocked asian parents by using asian-accents
2) accused Asian parents of abusing their children
by forcing their children to study.
3) generalized the Weibel community as "immigrants."
4) labeled the Weibel community as elitists.
5) argued that Asians have turned Fremont into Chinatown.
The lawsuit also charges that school officials have violated
the Brown Act because they gave insufficient notice of meetings.
Furthermore, they maintain that environmental impacts, such as an increase
in traffic along certain thoroughfares because of the boundary
changes, have not been thoroughly studied.
Conclusion:
-------------
expect a court injunction against the boundary change.
Timothy J. Lee
|http://www.sjmercury.com/premium/local/docs/schoolsuit06.htm
|
|Conclusion:
|-------------
|expect a court injunction against the boundary change.
Not necessarily. This is the first that has been publically
said about any accusation of racial discrimination. This
thing (Fremont Unified school boundary change proposal wars)
has been going on for a long time, because of all of the new
housing being built in the Mission San Jose area without
enough school space being built there. The current situation
is that even if one lives in the Mission San Jose area, one
may not be able to send one's children to a nearby school,
due to overcrowding.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy J. Lee timlee@
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No warranty of any kind is provided with this message.
Walter Lee
http://www.sjmercury.com/premium/local/docs/schools08.htm
Fremont district Rebuffs bias suit.
Parents' concerns called unfounded
BY DANA HULL, San Jose Mercury News Staff Writer
San Jose Mercury News. Wednesday. March 8, 2000
Summary:
The Fremont Unified School District (FUSD) dismissed the a racial discrimination
lawsuit filed by the Concern Fremont Parents (CFP), a group of Asian American
parents. The Concerned Fremont Parents charged that high school boundaries are
being redrawn so their children will boost test scores at a lower performing
campus. The suit claims that the district used race based classifications
in enacting the boundary plan and that Asian students have been singled out.
Fremont Unified attorneys argued that there is no evidence to support such a
claim and that while Mission San Jose High School scores higher than
Irvington on the state's API index, (Mission scored 888, Irvington tallied 692),
that such standardized test scores are just one measure of school and
student and should not be used as an indicator of the quality of education.
-- achievement. FUSD attorneys point to a number of state awards Irvington
has won. The CFP lawsuit was improperly filed to a federal courts in San
Jose which does not have jurisdiction over civil matters in Alameda County,
so the CFP case has been moved to San Francisco. Judge Martin Jenkins has
denied a request for a temporary restraining order, according to Jay Ross,
an attorney for FUSD. Erica Yew is the attorney representing the Concerned
Fremont Parents group. Mike Hirsher, the deputy general counsel for the
California Department of Education, asserts that school districts have
wide discretion to change boundaries and asserts that the states provide
no guarantee.
Walter Lee wrote:
>
> http://www.sjmercury.com/premium/local/docs/schoolsuit06.htm
>
> Parents' lawsuit claims bias
> * Group says boundary plan is unfair to high achieving
> Asian American students
> BY DANA HULL - San Jose Mercury News Staff Writer
> San Jose Mercury News. Monday, March 6, 2000.
>
> Summary:
> ----------
> A group of Asian American parents known as Concerned Fremont
> Parents has filed a racial discrimination suit against the Fremont
> Unified School District in the U.S District Court in San Jose,
> California. The Lawsuit charges that the Feb. 23 decision to alter
> the system by which elementary and junior high schools feed into
> high school was being redrawn so their children will boost test
> scores at a lower performing campus uses race based classifications
> inorder to enact the plan and violates the Constitution's 14th
> Amendment. At the heart of the dispute is the reassignment of
> students from Weibel Elementary School which has the largest
> Chinese American population and is the highest ranked school in
> the Fremont Unified district. Weibel Students will be moved
> out of the Mission San Jose High School attendance area and move
> to the Irvington High School. School officials have maintained
> that the shifts are necessary to alleviate overcrowding in
> the Mission San Jose schools. Erica Yew, an attorney with
> the San Jose firm of McManis, Faulkner & Morgan, is representing
> the parents. The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of
> compensatory damages related to any loss in home property values.
> Real estate in California has historically been tied to school
> reputation, and homes in the Mission area are among the
> more expensive in Fremont. The lawsuit claims that during
> school board meetings, white attendees:
>
> 1) mocked asian parents by using asian-accents
> 2) accused Asian parents of abusing their children
> by forcing their children to study.
> 3) generalized the Weibel community as "immigrants."
> 4) labeled the Weibel community as elitists.
> 5) argued that Asians have turned Fremont into Chinatown.
>
> The lawsuit also charges that school officials have violated
> the Brown Act because they gave insufficient notice of meetings.
> Furthermore, they maintain that environmental impacts, such as an increase
> in traffic along certain thoroughfares because of the boundary
> changes, have not been thoroughly studied.
>
Walter Lee
Learning Limits
How redrawn school boundaries are pitting Asian American Parents
against one East Bay school district
By Janet Dang
Asianweek. Thursday. March 16,2000. Vol. 21, No. 29
http://www.asianweek.com/2000_03_16/feature_learninglimits.html
Me
>a followup story can be found at...
>Learning Limits
>How redrawn school boundaries are pitting Asian American Parents
>against one East Bay school district
>By Janet Dang
Not very smart to hire an Asian lawyer to represent such a case...Hire a
Jewish one, and call for a jury...<G>
juju bee
dry...@nospam.erols.com wrote:
> http://www.sjmercury.com/premium/local/docs/schoolsuit06.htm
>
> Parents' lawsuit claims bias
> * Group says boundary plan is unfair to high achieving
> Asian American students
> BY DANA HULL - San Jose Mercury News Staff Writer
> San Jose Mercury News. Monday, March 6, 2000.
>
> Summary:
> ----------
Something similar to this was attempted near my neck of the woods,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ, and the situation and issues were similar,
although it invovled moving mostly upper class white kids to a mostly
black and latino minority school.
It never happened, the parents were able to overpower and overspend the
local and state powers at be.
>
> Conclusion:
> -------------
> expect a court injunction against the boundary change.
>
--
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman,
Monica Lewinsky"
-William Jefferson Clinton.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Walter Lee
Board Keeps Plan Intact for Fremont Schools
* Alternate fails: Trustee unable to talk colleagues out
of attendance Boundary Shifts
By Dana Hull - San Jose Mercury News Staff Writer
San Jose Mercury News. Thursday, March 23, 2000
http://www.sjmercury.com/premium/local/docs/schools23.htm
Summary:
Fremont school Board voted Wednesday night to keep intact
a controversial elementary school boundary plan. Trustee
Anna Muh had urged her colleagues to rescind their March 8
decision, but fail to get a second board member to second
support her efforts. Two weeks ago, she and Jeff Davis had
put forth a substitute proposal that would have minimized
the impact on students and drawn out the shifts over a
number of years - but Davis withdrew the proposal when
he was new information about transportation cost was
brought to his attention. Kindergarten and new pupils will
be assigned different schools in september. Linda Vista and
Marshall elementary Schools will be closed and students
will be sent else where next fall. Nearly 240 students from
Weibel Elementary school will be transferred to Leitch or
Warm Spring Elementary. More than 330 Ardenwood elementary
student will be shifted to Warwick elementary. The changes
will reduce overcrowding in a number schools and allow for
the expansion of the 20-to -1 student-teacher ratio in
third grad class rooms.
School officials also heard from the School Futures Research
foundation (SFRF) of San Diego, CA which is a non profit group which
oversees charter schools across the country. SFRF is working with Dr.
Parbhjot Kaur to start a charter school in Fremont, Ca. Kaur has
many years of experience as an educator in India and is a educational
psychologist. School officials worried that that the charter school
would be culturally exclusive or religiously based because the
majority of parents who express in Kaur's school are South Asian
Indian. Trustee Jim Petersen also was concern that Kaur's school
would take money away from Fremont Unified School District.
> Learning Limits
> How redrawn school boundaries are pitting Asian American Parents
> against one East Bay school district
> By Janet Dang
> Asianweek. Thursday. March 16,2000. Vol. 21, No. 29
> http://www.asianweek.com/2000_03_16/feature_learninglimits.html
>
> > > http://www.sjmercury.com/premium/local/docs/schoolsuit06.htm
> > >
> > > Parents' lawsuit claims bias
> > > * Group says boundary plan is unfair to high achieving
> > > Asian American students
> > > BY DANA HULL - San Jose Mercury News Staff Writer
> > > San Jose Mercury News. Monday, March 6, 2000.
> > >
> > > Summary:
> > > ----------