Inner-City Schools Shut Down as Media Fiddles

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Barbara at WIMN’s Voics blogs:

The story of thousands of schoolchildren without a library and books should be front-page news. Since when did sending inner-city children to bigger schools become a positive educational step in a city concerned with high dropout rates? The story of established neighborhood schools – with acceptable school rankings – closing their doors for lack of enrollment should be a reason for investigative stories by the media. The community should be outraged, right?

Not in San Antonio. Who’s going to tell this story? Here, one Hearst chain newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News is blitzing its ads on the front page as it seeks even more profits. Corporations, according to Jimenez Reyes, are the real power behind the closing of the six schools in a balance-the-budget bottom-line mentality as the developers seek prime inner-city real estate.

May First Rally

[Updated May 3rd]

I was late to setting up for the rally because a bunch of idiots decided to block fuckin’ traffic by San Francisco State University because they thought it would somehow help them in getting California State University fees to go down (I’m fuckin’ serious, more on that in another post though).

Unfortunetly I was unable to get a lot of pictures because I was one of the security personel for the Deporten de la Migra coalition. We all marched together and the job of security was to make sure we were all in formation, to make sure there were no flair ups and fights (just in case), deal with the cops (just in case), and to keep others from coming in and out of our formation thus messing it up and breaking our group apart.

There was a lot of us so I was very busy, couldn’t take to many pictures, only before and after the march. However, my comrade Hossam was there taking pictures and other folks from the coalition. So I’ll post some of those pics and link them when I get the chance. In the meantime here are all of my pics (that I chose) on my Flickr account.

Hossam has uploaded more of his pictures that he took on his blog and  on his Flickr account. Here a just a few.

Also, my comrade and fellow LFS organizer Pete took some photos as well.

Primero de Mayo

Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy

Hopefully I will be able to (I was able to) take some pictures from the May 1st immigrant rights rally latter today. I will post the photos on my Flickr account.