Prints of Wails

The local Seattle media has been crying to anyone who will listen about Friday’s SCOTUS decision which took the race factor out of school assignments. Numerous gallons of ink have gone to bemoaning the idea that the Seattle schools will become resegregated if they cannot force black kids into schools in predominantly white neighborhoods and vice-versa.

Even more ink has gone to crying about how the “Roberts Court” has “cemented a hard shift to the right and that we’re all in danger from it, yayda, yada, yada. Just go to either The Times or the PI and enter words like “Supreme Court”, “schools” and “race” into the search boxes to get the idea of how mad they are that their favored racist policies have been put down like the diseased cow that they were. I’d link them, but damn, that’d be a lot of links.

And if I linked all of them, you might miss the one that shows just how sick the Seattle School District really was.

The guy’s name is David Engle. He was the Principle of Ballard High School when the original lawsuit that was finally decided on Friday was filed. He quit that position “in protest” of the lawsuit and he now works at a school in Bellingham, a town just south of the Canadian border.

He was interviewed by the Seattle Times over the weekend for a story out today. he said that the final resolution of the case that made him leave his favorite job in Seattle had gotten him “fired up again” on the topic.

When speaking of his time at Ballard High School, the paper mentions that

Before Ballard High ended up at the center of the lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court decided Thursday, David Engle thought he’d stay there until he retired.

It was his dream job, just blocks from his house, in an urban school and district facing race and class issues he wanted to tackle.

I’m sorry that Engle had to leave a job he loved, but that was his decision.

However, his want to “tackle race and class issues” made him wholly unfit for the job.

A Principle’s job is an administrative one inside the school to which they are assigned. To deal with issues between teachers, make sure that they are doing their jobs, which is to instruct students on the subject they are assigned to teach, and to make executive decisions on those assignments. It is also to hand out discipline to students who are making it difficult for the other students to learn and hand other students off to law enforcement personnel when a student breaks the law.

A Principle is not a social worker whose job it is to repair the social wrongs of generations past. He is not allowed to give or to promote giving certain preferences to certain students while withholding them from other students. Any time he does so he is stepping out of his job description and harming students.

And if he is harming a student because of his or her race, then he is violating that student’s or that group of student’s civil rights. If he cannot see this as such, he needs to find a different line of work where he can “tackle race and class issues” and stay the hell out of the public school system.

The Seattle School District already employs social workers to “tackle issues”. In fact, they employ too damn many of them, in place of actual teachers. If they fired all the social workers on the payroll and replaced each of them with a teacher, not only would the district save money, they might actually hand out diplomas that were worth the paper they were printed on.

Leave the social work to the social workers. Schools are a place where instruction is supposed to happen. The only real lessons that the Seattle School District seem to favor are those of “If you’re not white or asian you will need the government’s help or you will never succeed” and “If you are white or asian, you’re only succeeding because of priviledge” being taught in all twelve grades.

Disgusting.