Grassroots Arkansas is a coalition of parents and civil rights activists. When reading anything about Arkansas, bear in mind that in the background is the Walton Family. They pull the strings.
Grassroots Arkansas sent the following letter to Mike Poore, the state-appointed superintendent of the Little Rock School District:
Mr. Poore,
We realize that you have been serving the LRSD community as Superintendent for four years now, at the behest of Governor Asa Hutchinson and AR Sec. of Education, Johnny Key, and not at the will of the people of our community.
We are yet seeking your humanity and your ability to appreciate that you have the power and the authority to right some wrongs during your administration.
Under your watch, LRSD students have NOT experienced safety and equity in their public school education.
African American and Latinx students have disproportionately been over criminalized with you as Superintendent. Though, Johnny Key has the authority to overturn your decisions or make decisions without your permission, you have not shown strong leadership in protecting the students and educators you have been entrusted to serve.
Again, I understand that you were not brought here to make things better for our LRSD community, but to further promote the agenda of the billionaires who have used their wealth and power to dismantle public schools all over this country.
My appeal to you is to get off the train of destruction and join the moral movement to overturn systems of racism, poverty, and the oppression that results from both.
You have seen and read the news reports: nothing good comes from forcing educators and students back into classrooms during this Covid-19/Corona crisis.
Surely, you don’t want the blood of students and their families, school bus drivers, school cafeteria workers, school nurses, school environmental service workers, school secretaries, school teachers, school librarians, school counselors, school social workers, school paraprofessionals, and other school personnel and administrators on your hands.
Surely, you don’t want to put yourself at further risk of testing positive and potentially dying for the sake of helping billionaires stay ridiculously wealthy, while the community you are serving gets sicker and experiences mass, untimely and avoidable deaths under your watch.
We know that you have children and grandchildren. We hope that you would protect our LRSD community with as much or more love and protection with which you provide them.
We are asking you to take the high road of moral justice by calling for temporary remote, safe and equitable schooling until reputable scientists say so. And, we hope that you will wait until the number of persons in our being infected and dying by Covid-19/the Corona Virus are what we experienced in mid March of this year when you called for LRSD school buildings to temporarily close.
This is a more than reasonable ask of you.
You owe it to us to engage in a school by school assessment to ensure that no students or educators are without necessary means and access to the effective resources they need to begin safe schooling remotely on August 24, 2020.
Upholding Justice and Human Love,
Rev. Dr. Anika T. Whitfield
LRSD community member
Grassroots Arkansas, co-chair
Arkansas Poor People’s Campaign, co-chair
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Odds that Mr. Poore seeks advice, without bias, from the University of Arkansa ed professor who a publication described as an advocate for Catholic schools?
The U of Arkansas has a Walton-funded Department of Educational Reform. All in for school choice.
And, one faculty member in particular who may see school choice as a way to advance Catholic schools?
Catholicism, a male-only leadership club because God likes exclusivity. God also wants the Knights of Columbus to be led by a former legislative aide to Jesse Helms and wants a pope’s shrine to serve as backdrop for a Trump photo op.
Pope John Paul’s shrine, where peaceful protestors don’t tread knowing the Barr goon squad will be aided in its use of brutal force against them?
I wonder if the Walton funded Dept. of Education Reform require students to take courses in the Chinese language?
Wow. It really has come to this.
A University of Arkansas education faculty member, self described as a “religious Christian”, co-wrote a new book, “Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice.” .
He states his opinion in an article about the book, “Religion and schooling can’t be fully separated, since each involves questions about basic values and because you can’t teach students about history and society without covering religion”.
The author, as I would fully expect, states, “We need to learn from the lessons of EUROPEAN (my caps) nations and from our past.”
Religion has a history of denying women equal status. And, current literature makes a case for American white supremacy’s links to the nation’s dominant religious sects (PRRI).
Schools have a moral responsibility which is to foster a foundation of equal opportunity.
And, they have a moral imperative to elucidate how a history of colonialism and white, male entitlement is unjust and damages the promise of America.
nice summation
In 2020, religion is still used to keep women and people of color from rising.
Rigging the system to avoid competing on a level playing field is what the profoundly insecure do.