Any chance of getting a copy of some these photos?

Thanks!

Hanebrink

There’s a school on a hill,
makes my heart to stand still.
Alma Schrader’s the one that I mean.
Like a star in the sky
it’s a beacon on high.
Alma Schrader is my favorite school.

The old football field
and the swings and the slide.
I see them at night in my dreams.
If I ‘er go away
for a year and a day
I’ll be thinking of my favorite school.

These pictures were taken in 1967 at the beginning of the civil rights movement. At that time, students went to neighborhood schools which created de facto segragation.

The middle school where I worked and where my sons went, was fed from elementary schools in older neighborhoods with lower income families… black and white… and ones with high concentrations of immigrants.

Minorities made up the largest percentage of our student body. 40% of the student body were black… a large number of whom were Haitian. Whites were about 40%. The remaining students were made up of 19 different nationalities… most from Cuba. Others were from Guatemala, Honduras, the Mideast, Russia, Egypt, South American, several Asian countries, and other places that I can’t remember.

Minorities were the norm rather than the exception. I truly believe being in that environment helped my sons, and other students, grow up blind to people’s differences and accepting of just about everyone.

The Internet – or the way the media has used it – made it worse.

It’s ironic that newspapers (and the one I used to work for is one of them) that do everything possible to insure that a written letter to the editor was actually produced by the person who submitted it, will publish anonymous comments by the lowest form of vegetable life (no offense to lima beans).

I’ve pretty much quit reading most of the Speak Out columns because there’s usually more heat than light.

I’m glad you came along to set the record straight.

I’m sure my wife will chime in. She worked in a middle school in FL where minorities were in the majority.

Have no idea where the poster on the Missourian got his demographic data. According to http://dese.mo.gov/planning/profile/building/arsd0160964020.html 2009 demographic data for Schrader reflects 83% White, 11% Black (DESE’s categorizations, not my own), 5% Asian, 1% Hispanic. Jefferson’s 2009 demographics break down to 42% White, 57% Black, 2% Hispanic, and 0% Asian. (And,yes, I did round to whole percents…but the demographics are there on the DESE website.)

Why the high Asian population at Schrader? One reason has to do with the location of Biokyawa to Cape. The families who relocate to Cape from the Japanese Biokyawa plant move to houses in the Schrader attendance center area. I am assuming Biokyawa owns “plant houses” within the attendance center. However, our Asian population is not limited to Japanese families as we also have families from China, Korea, Vietnam, and Malaysia among others. We have several students who are Muslim and have moved to the U.S. from Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran. Our student population is much more diverse than a cursory review of demographic information would indicate. We have one of the larger populations of limited English speakers in the district as we have several first and second generation immigrant families at the building. It has certainly broadened my worldview.