Attendees had the pleasure of hearing from Bill Wolfe and Gin Spaulding, two local authors who support Gay’s campaign.
Here is the introduction from Ivonne Rovira, a JCPS Teacher and officer for JCTA.
Bill Wolfe can be heard reading from Chapter 1 of his book, Twain’s Treasures.” You can request the book for free or at a small cost by ordering an activity kit from the Dear JCPS website.
And I’m being outspent by my opponents’ dark money PACs 100 to 1.
One of those PACs is tied to election deniers, MAGA extremists and SPLC-designated hate groups. The efforts appear to be coming from out of state. I filed a complaint with KREF on Sept. 9, but to date, they have not been able to locate the entities and individuals behind the deceptive campaigns in order to serve them with the allegations against them so the 15-day response period can commence. The right-wing extremist candidate they are supporting pulled his child from JCPS when he did not get his way with regards to masking, returning to school safely during a pandemic, the teaching of accurate history and the harms that racism causes to this day, to the point of bullying his child’s teachers. He wrote numerous letters to board members showing us exactly who he is.
Another PAC that is endorsing the incumbent has been led by the same man for over two decades. Over the years, he has been embroiled in numerous controversies when it comes to campaign violations, including recruiting someone to run for school board in a district that they did not live in and lying about their address, to sabotaging efforts of authentic concerned parents who wanted to run. But the greatest reason for concern, in my opinion, is how tightly he controls who serves on the PAC, how the clandestine election process benefits entrenched white leaders, and how the vote tabulation software can be easily manipulated to show whatever results he claims. This board chooses which candidates to endorse (or not endorse) and how much money to spend on their campaigns. For example, BSK is currently spending five times more on TV ads for the white incumbents who voted with him on the mask mandate, than they are on the Black incumbents who voted with their constituents. Teachers who are members of JCTA pay dues, and some of the dues money goes into BSK. They tell me their input on who to endorse is never sought, and there have been numerous incidents where members were outraged by their endorsements.
I’m just a PTA mom trying to be part of the solution. These individuals running to represent my community are latecomers to the public education scene, who don’t have the slightest idea what’s at stake, nor do they have a clue about how to address the crises that face our schools. I’ve been in the trenches literally doing this work for over a decade. When my current board member showed us that he either can’t or won’t hold district leaders accountable, and more recently, has refused to stand up to the bullies who continue to disrupt our meetings, I knew he needed to be replaced. When I couldn’t find anyone else to do this increasingly hostile, thankless, unpaid job, I stepped up. I don’t ask people to do things I’m not willing to do myself.
Below is the press conference held in front of Van Hoose befor the JCPS Board meeting Tuesday night, where one of the organizations I lead, Dear JCPS, announced the launch of our new Political Action Committee. Now JCPS teachers have a choice.
Inside the board meeting, the topic of the legislative priorities was on the agenda. I also spoke about my experiences over the past decade.
You can watch my speech here.
Adelmann addresses the JCPS Board on Oct. 25, 2022.
Please help this PTA Mom have a fighting chance to save Kentucky’s schools. We are the largest district in our state by nearly three times. We are the largest state in the country that is not decimated by charter schools and vouchers, yet. My race is not the only linchpin, but it is A linchpin because our board’s voting margin on important issues tends to be 4-3 and it tends to be divided along racial lines. If we lose just one seat to right wing extremists, we will lose our district to fascist ideologies. My board member has already shown us which side he’s on. In the other races, the incumbents are
Without some kind of hail Mary miracle play, incumbents are most likely to win, especially when they have hundreds of thousands of dollars of ill-gotten funds funneled into their race. The ONLY way we are going to win this is through word of mouth. I’ve been asking students to participate in a social experiment. Please help us spread the message by donating to our campaign, volunteering and telling everyone you know to vote #GPA4JCPS!
This one compares and contrasts the privilege of #BoatLife compared to the tragedy of poverty.
Please help us build our grassroots team from the ground up. Please complete my survey and let me know what concerns you have as well as to offer your support.
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My donation link is still pending. Please check back soon!
On May 10, 2022, ahead of the historic vote to finally pass the revisions to the district’s decades-old racist student assignment plan, our Coalition sent an email to the JCPS School Board and Superintendent, reminding them about the 11 recommendations that had come from over a year’s worth of meetings and data-gathering from impacted community members and representatives from grassroots organizations that serve West Louisville communities. Research and feedback, which we had attempted to present to them individually on more than one occasion, and even did several times, but our ideas were ignored.
We invited Board Members to attend weekly Coalition calls, at their convenience, so we could share with them our findings, and also learn their position on some of the items that were part of our growing list of demands. Some did, some didn’t. James Craig was one who did attend last summer, but I was so traumatized by my previous encounters with him, I refused to join the call. I asked how it went afterwards, and those who were on the call said he did all the talking and it sounded like a stump speech. Very little, if any, of the six items we had on our agenda got covered.
I remembered having seen a previous JCPS Board meeting where they made changes to the latest proposal based on some backlash they had received from some parents in historically privileged white neighborhoods who didn’t want their children to have to go to school so far away from home (picture someone from Gone With The Wind having a fainting spell right about now), so I hoped it was just buried under the seemingly insurmountable barrage of tragic news simultaneously saturating every news channel, including but not limited to, the massacre of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, a local school board filing deadline, and the events leading up to the January 6 Commission hearing.
I watched the final passage on the district’s YouTube channel, but didn’t catch any mention of any changes or improvements we requested, such as “Dual Resides for All” or “Ban the Box” so that students who don’t have a resides close to home can at least APPLY to transfer home to their neighborhood school without having to meet the same application barriers that a student who wants to transfer OUT of their neighborhood.
A couple of days later, I sent a follow up email (at the bottom of the page), since my first email had been completely ignored. Other than a link from the Board Secretary sharing something I already know how to get, Linda Duncan was the only Board Member to reply. While I do appreciate the effort, I found her responses to be tone deaf and flat out inaccurate. I have not yet had an opportunity to respond, but here are some of my kneejerk thoughts.
“No objections from the Coalition?” Please. First of all, the Coalition was not active when the Schools of Color were voted on. Two, there were two members of the Coalition on the speaker’s roster the evening the “males of color” school passed on June 27, 2017: Myself and Barbara Boyd. Guess what. We both spoke against it. Not for the same reasons the racists opposed it, but because it didn’t go far enough. Videos below are queued up to the speeches.
Barbara Boyd, chair of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, retired JCPS educator, encourages Board to set aside non-negotiables and wait before passing proposal.
Gay Adelmann, co-founder of Dear JCPS and Save Our Schools KY, parent of Academy @ Shawnee graduate.
So don’t blindly accuse us of not being consistent with our concerns as an excuse for not doing the right thing for West Louisville kids.
Linda also commented on one of my Facebook posts a couple of months ago, claiming that allowing West Louisville students to apply to attend school closer to home would go against diversity targets, which only seem to be enforced when Black people want equity, but not when white people want to segregate. Hmmm.
I have so much more to say, but I will probably save that for a livestream or podcast.
Please see her complete response:
From:Linda Duncan Sent: Thursday, June 2, 2022 10:29 PM To: moderator@dearjcps.com Subject: Re: Student Assignment Plan Community Feedback
Gay, it is confusing when concerns are expressed about the likely lack of diversity schools in the west end will have (now have, too) once parents choose for their kids to attend schools closer to home. No one refers to west Louisville Black churches as segregated when they clearly lack diversity. They are reflections of their neighborhoods. They don’t feel less effective because they are not serving white members.
With no objections from the Coalition, we created two Schools of Color. They both lack diversity.
I don’t believe for a minute that west end parents feel their kids have to go to school with white kids. That’s not the main concern for these parents who are seeking better outcomes for their kids. They just want their kids to have the resources they need to be successful, wherever they go to school.
The claim that suburban schools will no longer be diverse if west end kids choose west end schools is just not true. Suburban neighborhoods are extremely diverse as we speak. We are up to 14,000 immigrant students attending our schools all over the county. With the new plan, suburban schools may have fewer west end kids in them, but they will have plenty of other minorities continuing to fill the seats in suburban schools. Fern Creek is now 40% international students. My elementary schools are approaching 50% internationals.
I am not sure what you mean about doing away with applications for dual resides schools. We will be contacting every household to make sure every parent makes a choice. There will be no default assignments to any school.
One-way busing evolved because no one could force white parents to send their kids downtown if they did not want them there. White Flight was real in the 70’s. It doesn’t work. We can attract them to magnets that offer what they want for their kids – safety, strong academics, attendance with kids who have similar values – and we will develop more magnets downtown, but force is history. It is now all about Choice. Our new magnets will be diverse by intention, and theme-based, open to kids who want to be there.
I wish we could make demands on parents to promise to be accessible for communications to and from staff, make sure their kids attend school more than 90% of the time, make sure they follow school and class rules, make sure they do their assignments, and make sure they take part in extended learning, after school and in the summer, if their kids need more time to learn. We can provide the structures, as we are doing in this new plan, but parents/guardians must do their part, or under-achievement will continue to plague west end families.
I need to digest these suggestions a bit more. Thank you for standing up for those who don’t always have voices. You are welcome to serve on any of our committees to provide stakeholder voice.
Congratulations on the passage of the historic student assignment plan.
I apologize if I missed it. There has been a lot going on and it’s been incredibly difficult to process everything, much less keep up.
Regarding the list of items below, can you let me know which of them you were able to incorporate into the plan that passed last night? I would like to be able to report some good news back to Coalition members.
Thank you,
Gay
Gay Adelmann, Chair, Coalition for the People’s Agenda – Education Committee