To the editor:

I was very moved to see such a large turnout for the march last Saturday (June 6). Watching all of these protests is very encouraging when thinking about our long road toward racial equality and justice.

The turnout also gave me pause as I recalled the Seattle School Board closing 6 schools during a vote in January of 2009. One of those schools was Cooper Elementary, a 100 year old school here in West Seattle that served a predominately low income community of color. The closing of Cooper was very tense as the School Board pitted elementary schools against each other as each learning community feared their community would be torn apart.

As a parent of a Cooper student, I met with fellow parents and staff to strategize ways to appeal to the school board to keep the Cooper students together.  We attended the school board meetings, offering alternative solutions such as keeping Cooper together, moving us to another building since part of their argument was that another learning community needed to move into the Cooper building. Obviously we lost our fight as Cooper students were kicked out at the end of the 2009 school year and moved to other schools that were nowhere near the Cooper school.

11 years later, thinking about this is still very upsetting. The pieces that upset me the most is that no one will call that decision what it truly is: racist and classist. The conclusion was to literally remove one learning community from their building so that another learning community could move into that building. The community being removed was predominately low income and families of color while the community moving into the building was largely white and middle class.

The learning community that moved into the Cooper building was in need of a new building as their former building was full of mold, rats, inadequate heating and cooling. Fast forward to the fall of 2016 and that very building, the Genesee Hill Building, has been overhauled to provide a larger elementary school for a white, upper middle class community.

I want to remind everyone how recently some blatant racial injustice was handed down to our learning communities of color right here in West Seattle. We can’t undo it but we should learn from it, prevent it, and protest against it ever happening again. We can start by referring to the ruling of 2009 to close Cooper Elementary as racist and classist.

In Solidarity,

Molly Gras-Usry