Segregation is an idea thought to be eliminated many years ago. Yet for Shelby County, located in western Tennessee, segregation is still practiced. In fact, Shelby County was recently ordered to bus minority students to outside counties up to an hour away, as well as replace hundreds of white teachers with black ones. Some counties, like Shelby, still use 53-year-old desegregation laws. In Orange County, the rules state that a student cannot transfer only when they are in the majority at the school they attend, not the minority. At Cypress Creek, the majority of the students, faculty, and staff are Hispanic. This information only emphasizes the fact that we are segregated, even today.



“Currently, Orange County Public Schools are still under federal desegregation laws, and hopefully the federal court will lift the decision,” remarks Pam Ellis, a white Government and Economics teacher here at Cypress Creek. “I graduated from a school with one black student in my senior class and no more than five in the entire school entire school. We were very segregated, and Ill tell you right now that I went to Oak Ridge.”



Orange County is not the only county under federal supervision. As many as 253 school districts in the United States are still under supervision in racial inequality cases. While still being a large number, more and more school districts are trying to focus more on the economic status of a student as opposed to a students’ race. Some think that segregating students based on their economic status will be a less controversial issue, but the truth is, economic based segregation may prove to be much worse than racial segregation.



According to Cypress Creek junior, Katrina Augustine, “separating students based on economic status will eventually outweigh the race segregation. If the more financially stable children are at one school, they will naturally have the best of everything, while the ones that are not as stable get the hand-me-downs.”



If School systems around the country continue to segregate their students based on race or economic status, eventually, we will relapse back to the 1950’s, where all public schools were completely segregated, and ultimately have to wait 50 more years to rebuild the years of progress we have already made.