The Zip Code, A National Issue

                                              The Zip Code

                   As I examine the  Stamford Advocate story  of the Connecticut mother arrested for sending her son to a school in a district where she does not ” live” , I have to justify to myself that this situation is a national government issue. While it happened in Norwalk, a city in Connecticut, similar situations are occurring all over the country as districts try to allocate scarce local money for their local students. I can understand that local school districts are struggling. Here in Austin teachers are being fired because of low budget, but does that mean that a homeless  child should be removed from his school? Does that mean that his homeless mother should be arrested and could possibly face twenty years in prison and $15000 in fine for stealing $16000 in education from the Connecticut Kindergarten school her child was attending?According to staff writer Nickerson, the mother  Tonya Mcdowell  is charged with the federal crime of larceny. This is not a local matter anymore. It is a national, federal, government issue. The Constitution  explains the dilema best when it comes  to this mother’s case. The constitution cannot dictate to a State what to do about a public school ,but the constitution can provide equal protection through the fourteenth amendment.  Consequently, besides going to court to avoid jail time, Tonya McDowell , the mother seems to have a case in taking this to higher courts including the supreme court.

       I would fully support that move. Here we have a homeless unemployed mother, moving from shelters to friends, trying to find a stable life, being arrested for trying to put her child in a good school. What is wrong with that? Should a zip code dictate the life and death of a child? Ms. Mcdowell obviously knows the answer to that question when she thought she was doing the right thing by enrolling her child in her friend’s neighborhood school district. In a story done by NPR on this same issue, writer Helena Andrews quotes Henry David Thoreau “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." Ironically, only this week for a research, I read a study released by NAACP entitled "Misplaced Priorities: Under Educate, Over Incarcerate” . This sudy reveals that the federal government was spending six times more money on prisons than they were on education as they imprison blacks and browns.  I must conclude that it makes me sad to think that there might be no hope for Ms. McDowell and her son if this horrible trend continues.